On Heavy Rotation: 12 July 2023
New music by PJ Harvey, James Brandon Lewis, Kode9, Jlin and Janelle Monáe
Like every summer these days, it’s hottest summer ever. But that doesn’t mean the flow of good, great, cool and fun music is slowing down. People often ask me how I (try to) keep up. It’s lots of different ways: for years, I’ve subscribed to the Spotify profile of every artist I’m even remotely interested in. That means I always have 200 new releases in my Release Radar on Friday. I started doing the same thing on Bandcamp a few years ago, and they send e-mails as soon as there’s something new I might want to hear (and I do). My YouTube subscriptions go back over a decade and I check those at least once a day. There’s a couple of online music platforms that tweet out release news, I have a Disque Pop de la Semaine Instagram feed of (most of) my favourite album artists and record labels since 2017 and I have a txt file of weekly release dates in my Dropbox that I update whenever I see new album and EP announcements. (This is how I know I need to look out for J Hus, Lindstrøm, Natural Wonder Beauty Concept, Palehound, Traxman and about a dozen other albums this coming weekend.)
Miraculously, while great tracks come out all the time, there’s almost never more than one album a week that I can totally get behind. I suspect that I’ve been conditioned by running the above mentioned Instagram account. I need to find one great album every weekend, and now I can (usually) only find one great album. And that’s the
DISQUE POP DE LA SEMAINE
To be honest, I found the idea of listening to a new PJ Harvey album in 2023 a little bit like having to eat my vegetables. Although I liked some of the songs, I didn’t love her last album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project. I didn’t listen to the demo re-issues and soundtracks she put out between then and now. I didn’t even know she had published a book last year. But you know what? Vegetables are great!
I Inside the Old Year Dying is PJ Harvey’s first album in seven years, but she’s done a lot in the meantime. The book she wrote is Orlam, and apparently it’s written as longform poetry in the dialect of the county in the South of England where she’s from, Dorset. This new album is an extension of the experiential world of the book. In the lyrics, which are full of dialect words like wordle (which means world, I learned on Genius), Harvey embodies a 9-year-old girl named Ira-Abel and sings about her observations, experiences and fantasies in the woods, fields and village where she lives. Animals, people, nature and the supernatural all flow together. These are not fairy tales or stories even, but rather impressionistic and sensory poems in song form. The album sounds modern and antique simultaneously, detached from time in fact. (Ann Powers from NPR wrote an interview with Polly Harvey last week, which highly recommend.) For over thirty years, PJ Harvey has been one of the best and most idiosyncratic pop and rock artists around and she always manages to find new impulses to make extraordinary music. This is yet another very good album, one you can wander around in, alongside Ira-Abel, for a long time.
THREE SONGS
“Take My Hand, Precious Lord” is a certified gospel classic, written some ninety years ago, but based on a much older hymn. Mahalia Jackson wasn’t the first to record it, but it became one of her signature songs and she sang it at Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral in 1968 (and Aretha Franklin later sang it at her funeral.) To be honest I really don’t recognize the original melody in this jazz arrangement, the first single from a forthcoming album of ‘reimaginations’ of gospel songs that are associated with Jackson. It’s something to look forward to, regardless, because James Brandon Lewis is a formidable tenor saxophonist and his previous album with the Red Lily Quartet, 2021’s Jesup Wagon, was as profound and free as this three-part (stirring, rousing, melancholy) interpretation of “Precious Lord”. It leads you to the light, alright.
The British DJ, producer (and Hyperdub label boss) Kode9 has been listening to a pile of bop and fusion jazz records, and is sampling some choice piano and horn parts for “Infirmary”, the A side to an upcoming split-release with Burial on Fabric Originals. The jazz club and the club club fuse for a sturdy footwork track. Even the snare drums have a sampled-acoustic feel to them. The jumpy synth bass sounds are a reminder of Kode’s usual futuristic sound palette. His music hasn’t been this dancefloor-friendly in ages and it’s a real treat. I’ve had the track one repeat since it came out (yesterday) and it will be very interesting to see how Burial is going to complement this energy.
I havent heard the acoustic version of “Fourth Perspective” that Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion has been performing. But now that its composer, the incredible producer Jlin, has put out her own version, you can sort of it imagine it. I can see the percussive synth melody that plays throughout the track being played on marimbas or maybe even a glass harmonica? I hope it has the same otherworldly feel Jlin’s own “Perspective” conjures. Her footwork-adjacent beat manipulations are just as dreamy, a heavenly cloud of bass, toms and snares. She’s taking this music to places it’s never been before.
FULLSCREEN
To be honest, Janelle Monáe’s new album The Age of Pleasure isn’t doing it for me. I think it’s a little too easy listening for my tastes and I prefer her previous albums. That’s okay though, she’s obviously thriving in her last couple of music videos, both co-directed by the artist and Alan Ferguson. And both show environments wherein this music sounds perfectly suitable. All the guests look fabulous at the pool party in “Water Slide”. You can do the limbo underneath Monáe’s long braids as the band plays, before she straps her guitar back on. Does anyone really cool down from a dive in this pool? I’m surprised all that water hasn’t evaporated before the song ends.
Thanks for reading, listening and watching! Stay up-to-date until next week’s Heavy Rotations by checking out my Spotify playlist and the Disque Pop de la Semaine and Fullscreen Instagram accounts. If you have the chance, please tune in this Friday (4-6pm CET) for my monthly two-hour Heavy Rotation show on Echobox.radio. So many great new tunes!