Katie Gately: Fawn/Brute review – beguilingly disordered pop

(Houndstooth)
A third album whips up a maelstrom of dislocated voices and junkyard-style percussion as the US musician plots a trajectory from her daughter’s imagined childhood to adolescence

When Katie Gately emerged in the mid-2010s, bedroom pop still felt like a distinct genre born of circumstance, rather than a stylistic umbrella under which even megastars now operate. But the intricacy and audacity of the California-based artist’s third album reclaim the term for digital gear freaks and tinkering hermits: meticulous and introspective, but with a maximalist sweep that reflects the workings of a chaotic mind.

Gately’s avant-pop style, on her scatty 2016 debut and 2020’s punishing Loom, loosely presaged the rise of manic, internet-bred hyper pop. Her songwriting instincts on Fawn/Brute transcend that genre’s conceptual and melodic perversion, instead producing electro mini operas that whip up a maelstrom of dislocated voices, honking saxophone and roughshod, junkyard-style percussion. She wrote the album during a stressful but hyperactive pregnancy and the songs plot a trajectory from her daughter’s imagined childhood – sing-songy, frantic, bewildering – into the pandemonium of adolescence.

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by Jazz Monroe via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘I have to lie low. I’m totally on edge’: Uganda’s club scene fears anti-gay law

Kampala’s wildly innovative underground music scene has become a home for queer east Africans. A proposed law change not only endangers them, but an entire cultural movement

Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, in his 38th year of increasingly authoritarian rule, has declared that his people will never embrace homosexuality and that the west’s “deviations” are not to be normalised. Instead, Ugandan MPs have approved an anti-LGBTQ+ bill which recommends heavy sentences – including the death penalty – for acts of homosexuality in a country where it is already illegal. It awaits the president’s signature to become law.

The 2023 anti-homosexuality bill criminalises those touching another person “with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality” and any person who identifies as “a lesbian, gay, transgender, a queer” with up to 10 years in prison. Up to five years in prison is deemed adequate for the vague act of “promotion of homosexuality”. Only two out of 389 MPs voted against the bill, which has been broadly welcomed across Ugandan society.

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by Frank L'Opez via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tom Dale Company review – a mesmerising union of sound and movement

The Place, London
Jemima Brown excels in a cleverly assembled, four-way collaboration between choreographer, dancer, music and design

There are dancers who execute movement. And there are dancers who simply are the movement – Jemima Brown is one of those. She is an incredible mover, melting through space or glitching in sharp shards of motion. It all seems completely natural to her.

For several years Brown has worked with Tom Dale, a choreographer who makes dance that is steeped in technology, digital culture and electronic music. Surge, which opens this double bill, is a solo where Brown not only dances but sings live. She appears android-like, an AI-enhanced future human, in white skin-tight costume and close-cropped bleached hair. The feel is unearthly, Brown’s voice pouring over a dark electronic score by producer Ital Tek. She is part robot, part house diva. Surge’s universe is created by designer Barret Hodgson, with sheets of light slicing the stage, and complex digital projections, suggesting neural networks and electronic circuitry, patterns chasing Brown across the floor – sometimes she seems to control them, sometimes they control her.

Touring until 2 May

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by Lyndsey Winship via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We took the bassline from Mozart’: how Double 99 made Ripgroove

‘Michael Bolton flew in for Top of the Pops on a private jet – we took Addison Lee’

I was 19 when we made Ripgroove. It was 1997 and we had all this equipment we didn’t know how to use. We literally had the manuals in our hands, saying: “How do we do this?” It was such a steep learning curve, but that kind of naivety is important: making mistakes, fumbling around and doing things we just wouldn’t do now.

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by Interviews by Will Pritchard via Electronic music | The Guardian

Depeche Mode: Memento Mori review – a life-affirming farewell for Fletch

(Columbia)
Andy Fletcher’s two surviving bandmates reflect on mortality on an album of warm, weird electro-pop

Andy Fletcher’s death could’ve ended Depeche Mode. In Fletch’s 42-year tenure, curtailed last May, the Basildon band never made a truly bad album, rarely stooped to covers or re-records. The music gently declined in quality over the decades, but their tours grew bigger and better. Their final album would’ve been 2017’s Spirit, a decent tilt at reinventing the grand claustrophobia of 1987 masterpiece Music for the Masses. A solid legacy. Instead, surviving bandmates Martin Gore and Dave Gahan have assembled Memento Mori, an elegant farewell for Fletch.

Gore’s say-what-you-see lyrics are always best on the essentials of life – sex and death – and Ghosts Again is the pair’s best single in aeons, a singalong meditation on mortality that’s concise and powerful. Both are in fine voice. Gore’s choirboy trills have never been richer than on Soul With Me, while Gahan ranges ever-restlessly from operatic to reptilian, the electro-pop Freddie Mercury. There’s warmth in the album’s fusion of industrial grind with delicate melody, and producer James Ford sparks a revivifying weirdness in songs such as My Cosmos Is Mine. For a record preoccupied by death, its big heart bursts with life.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

100 Gecs: 10,000 Gecs review – derangedly catchy hyperpop

(Dog Show/Atlantic)
The US pop-punk duo go for the mainstream jugular with nagging melodies and killer hooks

Much delayed, the second album by LA-based sonic disruptors 100 Gecs – the duo of Dylan Brady and Laura Les – marks a step change in their sound: less Crazy Frog-in-a-blender hyperpop, more going for the mainstream jugular. A handful of derangedly catchy singles have already rolled off the tracklist, highlighting the pair’s fluency with nagging melodies and killer hooks. The glorious Mememe still offers up an earworm crafted from bass and tinnitus. More recently, the pummelling Hollywood Baby showcases their singalong pop-punk roots, its sonic simplicity offset by a nuanced lyric about self-doubt and the cost of living.

Given that 10,000 Gecs is a year-plus late, many of its meme-y moments have already been heard live. In among tracks such as 757 (a chiptune/big beat fusion) and I Got My Tooth Removed (ska-pop as penetrating as a dentist’s drill) are a handful of undershared nuggets. Frog on the Floor is, perhaps, a ska-pop track too far, while Billy Knows Jamie pays homage to rap-rock a little too well. But Dumbest Girl Alive, for example, highlights why this pair remain so exciting: it opens with the THX cinema tone, DJ explosions, a screamed “wooh!” and a guitar riff that dovetails seamlessly into a tinny keyboard line.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Comic James Acaster on his plunge into experimental music: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing – but I see that as a strength’

Could the celebrated standup knock out an album of his own tunes? Yes, he says, with the aid of a dusty old drum kit, 40 musicians – and a novelty animal costume

It started off, as many great creative undertakings do, as a joke. A few years ago, James Acaster’s parents gave him an ultimatum: collect your old dust-lagged drum kit from our house or we’ll throw it out. Not long before, Louis Theroux’s company had contacted the comedian to ask if he had any documentary ideas. Acaster, who spent his youth playing in bands before becoming a comedian, had a brainwave: how about, instead of a straight-faced doc, he made a mockumentary about himself pivoting “very pompously” from celebrated standup to Serious Musician?

The film would begin with the Kettering native swearing off comedy at his “last gig ever” before driving home to pick up his drums. Then he would start on his magnum opus, laying down some beats in the studio while staring down a gigantic cuddly alligator in a pink top hat (more on him later) as his worried manager, played by comedian John Kearns, looked on. Eventually, deciding his work wasn’t up to scratch, he would call in esteemed drummer Seb Rochford to play over the recording, allowing the comedian to pass it off as his own.

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by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Forget about the Hacienda!’ The DIY music scene pushing Manchester forward

No longer getting lost in nostalgia, the city is capitalising on musical talent from rap to punk and creating a community that can weather the cost of living crisis

“In terms of the breadth of talent, from emerging to established names, it’s the most exciting Manchester has been in my time,” says Rivca Burns, a 20-year veteran of the city’s music scene who is creative director of Salford’s Sounds From the Other City festival. “In terms of the infrastructure, it also feels like a precarious time. We’re losing rehearsal spaces and grassroots venues are struggling.”

In 2023, Aitch and Meekz are flying the flag for Manchester rap, Blossoms from nearby Stockport have updated the region’s indie with soft-rock pomp, and artists such as R&B singer-songwriter Pip Millett, speed garage producer Interplanetary Criminal, doom-punks Witch Fever, trip-hop experimentalists Space Afrika and industrial outfit Mandy, Indiana are pushing forward a city that in the past has been guilty of letting Madchester nostalgia overshadow the new. Even in the shadows that Burns describes – of post-pandemic debt, the cost-of-living crisis and the threat posed by commercial development to independent venues – Manchester continues to channel its innovative and creative spirit into supporting a new wave of talent.

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by Davey Brett via Electronic music | The Guardian

Fever Ray: Radical Romantics review – Karin Dreijer returns sunny side up

(Rabid)
Wittily exploring desire and relationships, the identity-surfing Swedish star sounds revitalised on their first solo album in six years

There can’t be many more significant 21st-century artists than Karin Dreijer, AKA Fever Ray. In and out of the Knife, their band with sibling Olof, they’ve created powerful, original outsider art in visual media, written an opera and treated gigs like Marina Abramović installations. In smartly choreographed performance, they play with identity and anonymity with thrilling verve, until you never know – or care – who’s singing or playing on stage. Yet their most recent album, 2017’s Plunge, was brittle and abrasive, with euphoria in short supply despite Dreijer’s enthusiastic embracing of queer love.

Radical Romantics is joyous by comparison. Yes, Even It Out is produced by goth potentate Trent Reznor and appears to be a series of threats to a child at Dreijer’s son’s school. Whether the result is darkly comic or hilariously terrifying is unclear. But mostly Radical Romantics is witty, inquisitive about physical and psychological relationships, and less austere than before. The songs produced with Olof are excellent. Dreijer is revitalised on comeback single What They Call Us, while the nervous desire trapped in mounting sexual tension on Shiver and Kandy is something only they can portray so hauntingly.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘For now, music is a weapon’: the Ukrainian musicians playing on as an act of resistance

Whether as simple consolation, celebration or to gird nerves for battle, musicians in Kyiv have found an important role in the war. Six of them tell us how they fight

At first glance, Kyiv looks and feels relatively normal. One year on from the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the streets, bars and restaurants once again bustle with people going about their lives. Look a little closer however, and it becomes clear how completely transformative and tragic the war has been. Bombed-out Russian tanks, missile ravaged skyscrapers, checkpoints, sandbags and tank-traps all scar the city. Life plays out to the daily wailing drone of the air raid sirens, bouncing off buildings. Worse is the constant fear for loved ones fighting further east on the frontline. People dread their phones pinging with more bad news.

It is hard to imagine living in such circumstances but for many, solace has been found in music. Despite the war – in fact, because of it – Ukraine’s cultural scene is fizzing with artists who have turned to music for comfort and resolve in the darkest of moments. They are using music to steel their souls, assert their identity and inspire opposition to the invasion. At a time of unimaginable fear and suffering, the musicians of Ukraine have decided that playing and listening to music is an act of resistance. Six of them – from orchestras to punk bands and radio broadcasters – tell their stories.

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by Joe Mulhall via Electronic music | The Guardian

Yazmin Lacey: Voice Notes review – songs to love and savour

(Own Your Own)
The Nottingham-based artist’s debut album delivers a seamless mix of jazz, soul and electronica

Yazmin Lacey is east London-raised but began making music from her living room after a move to Nottingham. Since 2017 she has released three EPs, and the title track of the last one, 2020’s Morning Matters, is a standout, saxophone-heavy ode to a new day. Her debut album, Voice Notes, produced by Dave Okumu, is an escapist, feelgood project that overflows with great storytelling. It offers introspective soliloquies, with lyrics derived from voice notes, memos and reminders journalled on her phone.

The fun and glittery Late Night People embodies the dreaming essence of the album. Bad Company, a song about a frenemy called Priscilla, is full of refreshingly real humour: “Woke with a demon on my shoulder. She’s smoking all my weed. Before we went to shoot she told me she’s much prettier than me.” The funk and psychedelic soul track Sign and Signal is an enthralling trip through layered sonics, while Lacey’s leisurely tone on Tomorrow’s Child’s dub beat shows versatility. Voice Notes is conceptually and musically accomplished, flourishing with inspired narratives and sensuality at every turn. It seamlessly blends jazz, soul and electronica without overpowering the singer-songwriter’s supple vocals. There’s so much to love and savour.

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by Kadish Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian