Musique Non Stop: March 2019

Friday, March 29, 2019

The Matthew Herbert Brexit Big Band: The State Between Us review – spacious political elegy

(Accidental Records)

The Matthew Herbert Big Band are attempting something that so far seems beyond our politicians: “To work out what a new kind of relationship with our European neighbours may look like.” This BPI-funded project has taken Herbert to Syria, China and Russia and has provided work for more than 1,000 musicians from across the European Union. It’s certainly a very big Band, although the project has perhaps lost some impact by no longer coinciding with the now-delayed Brexit. Still, as the wheels of democracy grind, The State Between Us certainly offers space for reflection.

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by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Wah Wah Radio – March 2019

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Kutiman – So Long feat. Rioghnach Connolly

Lamellen – Pippo Denemarken

Equal Echo – Pandora

Isaac Birituro & The Rail Abandon – Für Svenja

Ivan Conti – Bacurau

Saronde – Moyo Mama (Jimpster’s House Mix)

Iordache – Mannix pe Rebreanu

Time Grove – Jungle Bourjois (live version)

James Daniel – Hey Hey What a Day Today (live in session)

James Daniel – Lover Do You Wanna (live in session)

Fernanado – We Are

Paper Tiger – Slow Motion feat. Lando Chill

Max Rambhojan – Tou’t Jou Pa Min’m

Scrimshire – Won’t Get Better feat. Emma Jean Thackray

Yabba Funk – Oman Foamier (Danvers Edit)

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Dom Servini – Netil Radio Show #14

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Infinite Spirit Music – Live Without Fear

Dizzy Gillespie & Lalo Schifrin – Incantation

FZPZ – Lost

Ella Haber – Clay

Trev – For You Around Me

Paper Tiger – Bioluminscent (EVM128 Remix)

Jazzanova – Heatwave feat. Oliver St. Louis (Jazzanova Remix)

Quantic – Atlantic Oscillations (Dub)

Kira Neris – The Mission

Gabriele Poso – Cumbachero (Pamel Remix)

Laroye – Columbia 26a

DjeuhDjoah & Lieutenant Nicholson – Mbappé

International Soleil Band – Ta Lassa (Hide & Smile Edit)

Mombasa Roots – Karibishe

Guts – Senou Menm

Cochema- Al Mut’asim

Harvey Touch – The Wrong Shroom

Siti Muharam – Ashikibaya (Sam Jones Construct) feat. Tamar Collocutor

Reginald Omas Mamode IV – In Search of Balance

Sarah Tandy – Under The Skin

Lee Willhite – The World is a Ghetto

Steve Elliott – Wake Up

Tony Sherman – Slipping into Darkness

Laneous – Hold My HandJasmine – Everything I Do

Bobby Oroza – Deja Vu

Isaac Birituro & The Rail Abandon – Für Svenja

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Wednesday, March 27, 2019

The month's best mixes: dusty house, spooky techno and sparkling jungle

We select the best mixes in March, including recordings from Lena Willikens, MGUN and DJ Klaus

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by Lauren Martin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Honeyfeet at River Cottage Festival on 24/08

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Honeyfeet at Southcider Festival on 06/07

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Honeyfeet at Altitude Festival on 15/06

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Village Cuts at Le Mange Disque on 01/08

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Delia Teșileanu at Auster Club on 11/05

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Delia Teșileanu at Spiritland on 05/04

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Village Cuts at Juju’s Bar & Stage on 12/04

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Dom Servini, Scrimshire + Bopperson at Bussey Building on 06/04

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Dom Servini + Scrimshire at NT’s on 18/04

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Village Cuts at NT’s on 18/04

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Wah Wah 45s at NT’s on 18/04

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Monday, March 25, 2019

'It will rock your house!' Inside the Iranian electronic underground

Ten years ago, electronic music in Iran was suppressed by the government. But now these strange, often punishing sounds are finding their way into the world

Ten years ago Bahman Ghobadi’s film No One Knows About Persian Cats followed a young Iranian songwriting duo’s efforts to form a band with other underground musicians in Iran. It presented a country in which music deemed politically or culturally incendiary was prohibited, since artists hoping to perform or distribute their work had to acquire permission from the Iranian ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, or risk arrest.

Western journalists seized upon a narrative of sensitive outlaws holed up in underground studios, but today a new story is emerging: of a visionary music community now able to openly share its strange creations. Increasingly, Iran is becoming recognised as a hub for some of the world’s most vital, forward-thinking experimental music.

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by Alastair Shuttleworth via Electronic music | The Guardian

Friday, March 22, 2019

Jayda G: Significant Changes review – inclusive manifesto for dancefloors – and oceans

(Ninja Tune)

Berlin is famous for its vast nightclubbing landscape, with destination venues existing alongside an endless supply of spots for house-music enthusiasts, just off the beaten track. Yet it also harbours a reputation for having drained the genre of all colour, sometime during the course of a transatlantic cultural dialogue that would reshape the scene.

It’s lucky for the city, then, that it now counts Jayda G as a resident: the Canadian-raised dance music producer and DJ moved to Berlin in 2016 with a contagious affinity for convivial disco, funk and house in tow. She leads by example in her sets, performing with a lively physical presence that sparks an electric atmosphere and dares other dancers to match her pace. Incorporating her research as an environmental toxicologist, her debut album Significant Changes serves as a manifesto for both dancefloors and ocean floors.

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Stephen Malkmus: 'There's this reggae song where I sing in patois – it should not be heard'

The Pavement frontman’s new album is inspired by Berlin nightlife and YouTube tutorials. Is he having a mid-life crisis?

At Coava Coffee Roasters, a hip cafe in a gentrifying neighbourhood in Portland, shelves are made from disused machinery, the handmade bamboo tables are eco-friendly, and the single-origin coffee is served in glass Chemex carafes. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen couldn’t dream up a more stereotypically Portland scene – except for the music on the stereo, which shuffles between brash electropop and dubstep. It’s a strangely fitting place to meet Stephen Malkmus. As the former frontman of 1990s slacker titans Pavement, he’s an icon of indie rock at its scruffiest, yet his new solo album, Groove Denied, is electronic music partly inspired by a stint living in Berlin.

“I’m not known for being groovy,” admits Malkmus, a 52-year-old father of two who looks every bit the middle-aged rocker dad: salt-and-pepper mop top, white shirt, tatty white trainers. “The first song is supposed to sound like you went out clubbing in Berlin and came back and tried to make a song when you were off your head. Or an aural version of one of those pictures of [techno DJ] Ricardo Villalobos where he’s completely trashed.”

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by Philip Sherburne via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lasers, robots and DJ Lara Croft's Dentist: the rave lunacy of Bang Face

Held in a Pontins holiday camp, Bang Face Weekender is a riot of fancy dress, in-jokes and unfashionable dance music – and one of the most vibrant subcultural events in the UK

An audience member is dragged on stage in front of a couple of thousand fancy-dressed ravers and put into a homemade time machine. On the giant screen behind them, a timer counts up to 808, a reference to the classic drum machine behind much of rave music and also to the film Back to the Future – the theme for this year’s Bang Face Weekender.

This is all part of the annual opening ceremony. “We went through a stage of getting celebrities in, like Dave Benson-Phillips, Bez and Normksi, and eventually I just thought, you should be doing it yourself,” the festival’s founder James St Acid tells me. “Because the celebrities would come and be like, ‘OK I’ll do it’, and then they’d get all the lines wrong.”

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by Hugh Taylor via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Radio 3 cuts threaten musical ecosystem | Letter

More than 500 signatories from across the arts – including Shirley Collins, Jarvis Cocker, Ed O’Brien, Phil Selway, Peaches, Shabaka Hutchings, Norma Waterson, Martin Carthy, Brian Eno and Iwona Blazwick – call on Radio 3 to think again about changes to its schedules

Luke Turner (The BBC cutting Late Junction is a blow for experimental music, theguardian.com, 15 March), tore apart Radio 3’s decision to cut much of its specialist music programming. Today, we music lovers, musicians, artists, curators, record label owners, venue owners, festival programmers and critics are joining together to protest against these cuts as strongly as we can.

British jazz is experiencing a renaissance. Folk acts are attracting broader audiences. Electronic and experimental music is thriving, and boundaries between genres, mediums and scenes are being dissolved and swirled into ever more exciting permutations. It is staggering, therefore, that , in the month of its sold-out festival in London, Late Junction is being reduced from three shows a week to one. Jazz Now and Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz are being “rested”. Music Planet, Radio 3’s only dedicated programme exploring music from around the world, is having its running time cut by half. We welcome new show Unclassified, but it has only an hour in the schedules. This is not enough.

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by Letters via Electronic music | The Guardian

Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine: how we made Sheriff Fatman

‘We used my flat’s rank toilet on the record sleeve with my guitar shoved into it – though I put a plastic bag over it first’

I had read about a dodgy landlord in the South London Press. The drug-dealing, the “phoney prescriptions”, the awful living conditions for his tenants: it was all in the newspaper, even his physical stature. All I had to do was change his name – and I’d turned an awful story into poetry and pop music.

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by Interviews by George Bass via Electronic music | The Guardian

Monday, March 18, 2019

Music, fashion and town planning: how nightclubs change the world

From architecture to drug policy, nightlife quietly incubates ideas that then flourish in the mainstream. But, with brands moving in, club-cultural innovation is under threat

In the popular imagination, nightclubs are sweaty basements providing a soundtrack to drunken fumbles in the dark; an alien world with no connection or relevance to the more wholesome things that happen during the day. But the reality is that anyone with an Instagram account, a fashion magazine subscription or an interest in social activism is ultimately engaging with club culture. Nightlife is like an angel investor in pop culture, silently incubating grassroots movements and social moments, and since the first iterations of the disco, clubs have been a breeding ground for cultural experimentation.

To avoid disappointment get down early if you are buying a ticket or on the guestlist. Ideally before 12! Reminder that there is no pressure to dress up tonight!! Come as you feel

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by Anna Codrea-Rado via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Stephen Malkmus: Groove Denied review – stark, forbidding soundscapes

(Domino)

With a couple of honourable exceptions – specifically his self-titled 2001 solo debut and last year’s excellent Sparkle Hard – Stephen Malkmus has too often during his post-Pavement career found himself bogged down in amorphous, sub-Grateful Dead jams. Indeed, Frank Black aside, it’s hard to think of a solo canon that’s been quite so consistently underwhelming.

Which makes this long-delayed adventure in electronica such a surprise. In fact, it’s such a radical departure that his record label initially refused to release it – hence the title. Largely written in Berlin and recorded alone at home in Oregon, its stark and forbidding soundscapes owe much to the early-80s synth movement, the likes of opener Belziger Faceplant far more concerned with texture than melody; the deadpan A Bit Wilder, meanwhile, could be a mechanically recovered New Order offcut, circa 1981. Curiously, this bold new direction isn’t sustained; the further into the album Malkmus gets, the more normal service resumes, as if he isn’t entirely convinced of his new direction. Forget Your Place’s loops and treated vocals recall the Beta Band at their wooziest; Come Get Me sounds like a flab-free demo version of one of his Jicks songs; Ocean of Revenge, for all its flirtation with drum machines, is an unashamedly lovely acoustic ballad. It doesn’t make for a particularly cohesive album, but perhaps that’s the point.

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by Phil Mongredien via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Cinematic Orchestra: To Believe review – heartbreakingly brilliant

(Ninja Tune)

I’ve always found the Cinematic Orchestra too pretentious, too austere, a band whose ambitions outran their abilities. With this fourth album, 12 years after their last, that austerity is over. To Believe is heartbreakingly brilliant: a collection of exquisitely assembled songs that appear delicate from a distance before revealing a close-quarters core strength. Band leaders Jason Swinscoe and Dominic Smith have loosely arranged seven lightly jazzy tracks around the themes of belief and what it means to believe. Much as the pair attempt to make movies with their music, the best song has no dialogue: the meandering instrumental Lessons is a glorious balm, nine minutes of murmuring conversation between the players, dominated by Luke Flowers’ gently military drums. It has depth and meaning without context, the ideal soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist. The sweeping grandeur of A Caged Bird/Imitations of Life is another cinematic collaboration with the always articulate and engaging Roots Manuva, a sort-of sequel to the epic All Things to All Men, and just as good. Every song here could easily be five or 10 minutes longer. A triumph.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Friday, March 15, 2019

The BBC cutting Late Junction is a blow for experimental music

The Radio 3 show dropping from three nights a week to one deprives audiences of musical diversity and removes a vital lifeline for left-field musicians

At the end of February, hundreds of people packed into the artfully dilapidated surroundings of Earth, a former art deco cinema in east London, for the inaugural Late Junction festival. Over two sold-out nights, it showcased exactly the kind of programming that makes BBC Radio 3’s flagship experimental music show great: a stunning set by revived post-punk pioneers This Is Not This Heat; the fractured state-of-the-nation techno of Gazelle Twin; the first ever performance by doom-jazz troupe Pulled By Magnets; and a new project featuring singer Coby Sey and Under the Skin soundtrack composer Mica Levi.

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by Luke Turner via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Cinematic Orchestra: To Believe review – soundscape originators' accomplished return

(Ninja Tune)
The sound of TCO’s tasteful electronica has become ubiquitous. This new album isn’t experimental or idiosyncratic enough to stand out

Even if you believe yourself to be unaware of the Cinematic Orchestra, the London collective formed in 1999 by Jason Swinscoe, you will more than likely be familiar with one of their songs. To Build a Home – a spare and exquisitely beautiful piano ballad featuring the Canadian musician Patrick Watson – has become a TV score standard in the decade since its release, soundtracking a slew of blockbuster dramas. Yet while the song’s ethereal melancholy has proven enduring, its makers have dipped out of view in the intervening years. To Build a Home was the opening track on the Cinematic Orchestra’s 2007 record Ma Fleur – until now, the last proper album they released.

That makes To Believe a comeback of sorts, an opportunity for the 20-year-old group to restate their relevance. To those ends, Swinscoe has described the album as a contemplation on belief in the age of Brexit. Yet while the verbose track titles hint at lofty ideas, the songs don’t so much pin down and interrogate our modern malaise as transpose it into wilful abstraction. Sonically, meanwhile, the topic leads the group to set up camp in the space between their second and third albums – the former ominous, jazzy, trip-hop-informed; the latter a prettier, more wistful collection of featured-artist crooning. At one end of the spectrum is A Caged Bird/Imitations of Life, which sees the group reunite with Roots Manuva – who guested on their edgy, expansive 2002 track All Things to All Men – for a mellower collaboration. To Believe’s titular opener, a pared-down vehicle for Moses Sumney’s soft, airy and soaring vocal, cleaves most closely to Ma Fleur’s style, but can’t quite recapture its muted majesty.

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by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian

Karen O & Danger Mouse: Lux Prima review – complex and lingering

(BMG)
The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s frontwoman shines beyond her signature yelp on this cinematic, subtle album

After lucratively manning the boards for a series of big pop names in recent years – Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Portugal, The Mancorrect et al – Danger Mouse delivers what feels like more of a passion project. It’s reminiscent of another of these, his 2011 album Rome with composer Daniele Luppi: both are heavily influenced by Ennio Morricone’s compositional style of pattering drumbeats and sweeping strings. His cinematic ambition is foregrounded in the opening title track, a nine-minute symphonic pop suite centred around a theme that is revisited on the closing Nox Lumina, and, truth be told, isn’t particularly exciting. It serviceably denotes grandeur and romance but without any real melodic invention.

Where the album comes alive is with more traditional songwriting, anchored by Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O, who co-writes throughout. Her image in the popular imagination – a makeup-smeared sex banshee – does her a disservice: she has huge emotional and textural range, something that the handsome production helps to foreground here.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

50 great tracks for March from Tierra Whack, Hayden Thorpe, Squid and more

Punk-funkers Squid step on the gas, Jessie Ware moves left of centre and Tierra Whack breaks the one-minute mark – read about 10 of our favourite songs of the month, and subscribe to the 50-track playlist

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Monday, March 11, 2019

Dom Servini – Unherd Radio Show #26 on Soho Radio

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Elaquent – Sunrays (Intro)

Georgie Sweet – Sorry

Liquid Saloon – Won’t Be Led By Fear feat. Jenny Penkin

melodiesinfonie – AO Longo De Rio

Alphabets Heaven – Wild Love

Jitwam – Temptations

Medline – Relaxation Electrique

Alice Clark – Charms of the Arms of Love

Miller, Miller, Miller & Sloan – Key To My Heart

Jordan Rakei – Mind’s Eye

Pinty – Tropical Bleu

Birdhouse – Crappy Samba

Dubben – Jesus Boogie

Eumir Deodato – Arranha Ceu (Skyscrapers)

William & The Young Five – You Turn Me On

Guts – Mucagiami (Patchworks Remix)

Sammy Bananas – Finesse

G. Markus – Cherchez Le G

Vhyce – Say We Will (Titeknots Remix)

14KT – The Power of Same (Kaidi Tatham Remix)

Resolution 88 – Taking Off (Mochi Men Remix)

FootRocket – Stop That Man

Fred Everything – Palma (Ilija Rudman Expressions)

Zara McFarlane with Dennis Bovell – East of the River Nile (Alt. Take)

The Rationals – Glowin’

Mike Longo – Soliloquy (Ole Smokey Re-edit)

PHRESOUL – Institutional Violence

Ziad Rahbani – Abu Ali

Shafiq Husayn – Show Me How You Feel

Yves Jarvis – Hard to Say Bye

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Saturday, March 9, 2019

Badgers, coke and Zac Efron: why Hollywood gets club culture wrong

The life of the DJ is often presented as a utopia on screen. Can Idris Elba’s new show Turn Up Charlie buck the trend?

Vacant-looking women in bikini tops. Huge fluffy mountains of cocaine. Pretty people gently rutting on a brightly lit dancefloor. No sweat. No shirts. No one over 30. Congratulations! You are watching a film about dance music and DJ culture! Yet anyone who has ever been to an actual club will know that the chasm between what we see in movies and on television compared to the real experience of being in a sticky warehouse in Hackney Wick at 1am on a Friday night is vast. From the lurid It’s All Gone Pete Tong and glossy We Are Your Friends to the pilled-up gurn-fest that is Human Traffic, we have had well over two decades of clubbing on our screens, yet it is rarely depicted truthfully.

Evidently, there is something about the role of a DJ that is impossible to capture, but the new Netflix comedy series Turn Up Charlie, starring Idris Elba as a washed-up garage DJ, comes closer than most. That’s mainly because Elba’s character is far from a major player. There are no sold-out shows at Printworks, weekly residencies at Phonox or headline slots at Dekmantel for Charlie. Instead, Craig David pities him, he does wedding sets for £50, dosses about with his perma-stoned sidekick – played by Man Like Mobeen’s Guz Khan – and ends up as a nanny for a spoilt 11-year-old whom he takes to Cyberdog instead of the cinema.

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by Leonie Cooper via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

'Blackness will never go away': how Solange takes pride in her roots

At an immersive, city-wide multimedia presentation of her new album When I Get Home, the singer-songwriter explains how her childhood home of Houston nourished her creative spirit

‘It’s one thing to think with your spirit,” says Solange Knowles. “It’s another to actually live it through your body.” The Solange of today works with feelings, grooves, and frequencies in mind. If A Seat at the Table, her breakthrough third album, was a lyrically dense record about the complexities and struggles of the black American experience, then When I Get Home, her latest release, is the sonic manifestation of that blackness. Staccato rhythms and meditative mantras – designed to ground and heal her after time on the road – ripple on through the bodies of her listeners. It’s an album about settling into familiarity: with yourself, the people around you, and the places one calls home.

At the SHAPE community center in the third ward of Houston last Sunday evening, the record comes to life during a screening of a film, also entitled When I Get Home, that Solange created and directed to accompany the album. Despite the celebrities in attendance, this isn’t a premiere. The album arrived days before, with the film launching simultaneously on Apple Music and the recently revived, early-internet social network Black Planet. Instead, it is a celebration of her return to her roots.

Thank you to alll of uuuu! I’m coming up for air and overwhelmed with gratitude for all the love U sharing. Thank you for always giving me the space to expand and evolve and express. For constantly opening up my world, and allowing me to show you my own new ones. I express for survival, for breath. This shit gave me so much joy to make! I wasn’t afraid. My body wasn’t either, even at times of uncertainty. I love and appreciate u guys infinitely. You make me feel safe and held even in this big big strange world. I can’t thank you enough. It’s been hard to answer where home is, hard to know if it’s past or future...this album and film is one stream of thought and reflection into answering that. I thank you for your time and energy experiencing it with meee. So much love!

my Sol-Angel... no one talk to me ever again

I’ll always be a black woman, and I’ll always create work from this black woman’s body

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by Britt Julious via Electronic music | The Guardian

Monday, March 4, 2019

Stars pay tribute to Keith Flint: 'A powerhouse of energy and attitude'

From Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno to the Chemical Brothers and Azealia Banks, musicians remember the Prodigy frontman

I discovered the Prodigy through Experience, back in 1992. There used to be a rave record store in Leicester called 5HQ – quite a frightening place, a bit like in Human Traffic. We used to hang around in there. I think they were playing Charly: I bought it, took it home and played it on my decks for days. It just didn’t really sound like anything else. There was a tribal quality to the beat. Somehow it was aggressive like punk – it had an edge that other things around the time didn’t. But it also had a pop sensibility. It really felt commercial even though it wasn’t. We were rave kids with the baggies and the t-shirts, but Keith was next level. He was always well dressed, a real one-off – you could see where everything came from but he had his twist on it. They’re the ones that last.

I think the first time we met him was at V festival. It’s always quite nerve-wracking when you meet someone you really admire. You think people are gonna be more mad, more like the person they were on stage, but he was gentle, sweet, encouraging. That was the beautiful thing – he was really interested in the music we were making. When we made the second record, he came down to the session and he was so supportive. We could see it was nice for him, maybe, to see through the eyes of someone going through it again. He’d been there and done it, and he saw these young kids doing the same thing. I’d always go and see them live, so I’d see him backstage, fleetingly, but it always felt like he had our backs, which was amazing, considering that it was him that made us wanna do it ourselves. I’m heartbroken, really. It stops you in your tracks.

If it were not for your fear I could not learn to be fearless ... You gave me options when I felt there were none

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by Interviews by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Keith Flint: the neon demon who started a fire under British pop

By gleefully escalating the moral panic around British dance culture, the Prodigy frontman showed that rave could be the true successor to rock’n’roll

Like virtually every 90s dance act that unexpectedly ascended from releasing underground club tracks to selling a lot of albums, the Prodigy were faced with a problem: their mastermind was a producer, not a pop star.

Liam Howlett was prodigiously gifted, visionary enough to have turned the Prodigy from a joke into rock stars. Their 1991 single Charly might be the ground zero of novelty rave, its sample from a 70s public information film spawning umpteen tacky imitations that sourced their hooks from old kids’ TV shows or adverts. By 1994, they were an original, eclectic musical force that drew on everything from the hardcore scene that had originally spawned them to hip-hop and punk. Their second album, Music for the Jilted Generation, went to No 1 in the UK that year, long after most of their imitators had enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame and been forgotten. But, like most dance producers, he wasn’t a natural frontman, the skills required to make fantastic records being different from the skills required to captivate an audience.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Prodigy's Keith Flint – a life in pictures

From his early days with the rave group to still iconic live performances 25 years later, we look back at the life of Keith Flint, who has died aged 49

Keith Flint: Prodigy vocalist dies aged 49

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by via Electronic music | The Guardian

Friday, March 1, 2019

The Japanese House: Good at Falling review – candid breakup pop lets the air in

(Dirty Hit)

The evolution of The Japanese House has been a lesson in slowly peeling back the layers. The musical moniker of Buckinghamshire-born Amber Bain (the name inspired by a childhood holiday home once owned by Kate Winslet) was part of a concerted attempt to use generalities as opposed to specifics. That also meant there were no press pictures to accompany her early EPs of skittering electronic hymnals, while her voice was often buried beneath ghostly, often androgynous effects. On Good at Falling, her debut album, the walls come tumbling down, with Bain picking at the scabs of a broken relationship with the sort of direct candour that would have seemed unimaginable when she arrived in 2015.

Fuelled by this emotional blood-letting, plus extensive touring with label-mates Wolf Alice and the 1975 (the latter’s George Daniel also co-produced the album), Good at Falling also sees Bain opening up her sound. While those early EPs seemed almost hermetically sealed, here Bain lets some air in. She skips unadorned around the lovely acoustic strums of You Seemed So Happy, and channels 70s MOR on the yearning Faraway, while the stately pop of Lilo – so specifically about the dissolution of her relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Marika Hackman that their breakup is re-created in the accompanying video – feels like a refreshing splash of cold water on tear-stained cheeks. Even when the lyrics are mired in sadness – “I think I’m dying, because this can’t be living” Bain sighs, on the Chvrches-esque Maybe You’re the Reason – there’s a laser-guided focus that keeps things from imploding.

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by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian

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