Listening Clark :: Class Of 2023 :: Module Twelve
Hullo there, dearie…
To slightly misquote Thom Yorke, I do it to myself, I do…
Just when I thought I was going to be able to get a good grip on sailing through my listening schedule, the mid-year Best Of lists arrive; and whilst it’s nice to know there are people at Rolling Stone and NME who are still listening to reggaeton and K-pop, it also means that there’s a newfound glut of new releases for me to cast my ears towards.
However, before I get back on the ever-elongating track, as per here are some words on a few highlights from the past few weeks…
Listening Clark :: Class Of 2023 :: Module Twelve
3D Country – Geese
Standing alongside the aforementioned Model/Actriz as one of the more white-hot upstarts to emerge from the art-rock scene in Brooklyn, Geese follow up their 2021 debut with a freewheeling, rabble-rousing, at times scarily chaotic Americana-punk odyssey that could not better represent the fractured state of identity that their homeland is going through right now.
Aspirin Sun – Emma Tricca
A ruminative paean to the beauty and paranoia inherent with social isolation, Emma Tricca’s fourth album and debut for Bella Union is a plaintive piece of psychedelic folk-pop whose kaleidoscopic sound palette works as the most soothing audio-based balm, a wonder really considering its key gestation period took place in that dreaded first half of 2020.
DATA – Tainy
A production titan of the reggaeton music scene whose work has already seen them collect multiple Grammy awards, Marcos Fernández’s debut solo album finds the Puerto Rican tunesmith in fine form amongst finer company, armed with a roster featuring the one and only Bad Bunny himself, as well as Rauw Alejandro, Daddy Yankee, Arca and Four Tet among others.
I Don’t Know – brdmm
Having courted their fair share of appreciative notices for their debut album in 2020 (one such understated rave calling it “a modern shoegaze classic”), bdrmm do well to continue to stoke their rise as Hull’s Best Thing Probably Ever Really with another collection of measuredly restless melancholia on album number two, awash with an intoxicatingly fraught malaise as it is.
Is It? – Ben Howard
If you are seeking a contender for one of 2023’s better volte-faces in terms of genre-based directions, you could do far worse than UK folk-pop stalwart Ben Howard’s fifth album, which finds the musician coming to terms with suffering two mini-strokes last year and with the help of producer Nathan Jenkins by using percolating synthpop with sweetly diverting results.
Janoob EP – Toumba
Translated into English as “The South”, Yazan Zyadat’s third EP finds the promising producer/DJ channelling the beguiling traditional instrumentations and rhythms from their native Jordan into a mini-collection of intelligently composed and seriously swoonsome dancefloor fillers.
Please Touch – Rrose
An electronic avant-garde audio artist whose work would sound as much at home in a lofty art exhibition space as it would a debauched early-morning after-party, Seth Horvitz continues to tread a path that finds them alternating between ambient drone and seductive techno, imploring the listener to submit with a sultry-yet-sinister authority.
Routes – Samuel Blaser
Paying tribute to the musical legacy of one of Jamaican music’s key pioneers Don Drummond, trombonist Blaser assembles a fine band of musicians (including the late Lee “Scratch” Perry) to play alongside his own amiably virtuosic abilities be it on standards or originals, finding a happy medium between smooth jazz, reggae, dub and ska that is at times is as effortlessly beatific as either genre at its best.
The Beggar – SWANS
The sixteenth album in a forty-year-plus pantheon that has seen its key progenitor Michael Gira both enthusiastically embrace and violently abscond any and all conventionalities found in experimental rock, The Beggar develops previously laid ideas from demos released last year with the kind of mounting, galvanising awe that is by turns inspiring and frightening.
Yawning Abyss – Creep Show
Back for another round after their 2018 debut, the electro-pop supergroup that comes with equal parts Tunng and Cabaret Voltaire alongside the sweetly-jaded vocal stylings of one John Grant at its centre sign this module off with impishly incorrigible style, their synthcraft exceptionally carrying off the right air of aloofness and yearning.
And there we have it, 600 albums later… see you after the next fifty! 🙂
xxxo
