From hereon in the big list I think, everything is a potential number 1. All of these are truly excellent. Each time I listen to one of ‘em, I want to move it straight up to the top, until I play the next one in line again. And, the records in parts #1 and #2 weren’t bad either. Such a fine year for ears, if not for most other organs and appendages.

 

Mixing near-eastern processional/celebratory music with the scuzz-drenched tape cut-up methodology of the western noise underground, N.R. Safi aka Naujawanan Baidar makes a racket as original, incendiary and authentically psychedelic as anything the brutalised culture of the 21st century has to offer. Wherever music finds itself heading in future years, MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING would seem like a good start.

From June 2020:  

“..combining traditional Afghan instrumentation with a bewildering array of loops, radio textures, distortion, digital effects, drums, Western/South Asian instruments and more besides, [this] dense and beguiling set of heavy psyche-blasted quasi-enthno semi-forgeries basically sounds like the wildest dream of some Sublime Frequencies junkie, obsessively scanning the scanning the short wave dials in search of mind-blowing pan-global audio to rip and reconstitute for hungry ears.

Beautiful collage artwork, vintage field recordings and track titles like ‘Blood Can’t Clean Blood’ speak of a legit and powerful engagement with the issues of cultural displacement and transformation which inevitably surround this music, which pulses and shrieks across imagined and real airwaves, like an affirmative signal of resistance for Middle Eastern and North American deserts alike.”

Side D of the album, comprising ‘Shakl-e-Barqi’, ‘Nagin Saaz’ and ‘Panj Ruz Pesh’, strikes me as particularly choice. 

 

I wouldn’t be a Stereo Sanctity best-of-year list without Mike Vest sticking his oar in at some point, and the most noteworthy project undertaken by the UK’s leading maximalist guitar savant during 2020 was undoubtedly Ozo, a studio-bound trio in which Vest’s distinctively uncompromising bass and guitar work goes head-to-head with the Equally forthright sounds of Karl D’Silva (sax) and Graham Thompson (drums).

Of ‘Pluto’, my favourite of the two LPs, I said in July 2020:  

“Moving at least slightly closer to realising the elusive space-rock / free jazz ideal Ozo are allegedly aiming for, this one is a heavy, heavy trip – a hulking motherlode of King Crimson-accented sonic gloop which feels more ‘high gravity planetary surface trek’ than ‘interstellar joyride’, stumbling over boulders on the way back to the landing module as the low-hanging sky overhead behind to look like this album’s cover.”

‘Saturn’ is well worth a listen too however, particularly for fans of Thompson’s powerhouse drumming, which effectively assumes lead instrument status through much of the LP, his meteor shower beat-downs often pummelling both Vest’s galaxy-questing, ‘Space Ritual’ bass lines and D’Silva’s squalling, disembodied ‘Funhouse’-in-a-hall-of-mirrors sax echoes into submission. A uniquely wild and disorientating new sound in the space-rock firmament, whichever way you look at it. 

 

The interplay between bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger was a big part of what made the New York side of Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP so sublime, and here the duo return with one of the world’s first real lessons in how to make the concept of a “lockdown album” really work.

Culled from a series of lunchtime live-streams the couple undertook from their NYC apartment through the peak of the city’s first wave in March-June 2020, Douglas & Younger’s instinctive / off-the-cuff playing here succeeds in providing a veritable beacon of good ol’ peace, love and understanding in a cold and threatening world, proving (lest the thousands of such recordings made during the 20th century left us in any doubt) that with the right players, and the right feel, one half-decent microphone is all that’s needed to make an album for the ages.

Concentrating largely on melodically potent material which will likely be at least distantly familiar to most of their listeners, ‘Force Majeure’ is probably at its best when the duo explore the jazz repertoire, working over such touchstones as John Coltrane’s ‘Equinox’ and ‘Wise One’, Alice Coltrane’s ‘Gospel Trane’ and Pharaoh Sanders & Leon Thomas’s ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’ with a sense of warmth and constant harmonic discovery that it’s near impossible not to be moved by. Their (instrumental) interpretations of pop songs are good too, particularly when Younger takes the lead on comparatively simple, heart-rending reimaginings of Clifton Davis’s ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ (you know, the Jackson 5 one) and Kate Bush’s ‘A Woman’s Work’.

On a slightly snarkier note, I would also like to state that this is the one and only occasion upon which this blog will provide positive commentary on a release which includes a track composed by Sting (that being Douglas’s solo bass take on a something named ‘Inshallah’ on side # 2). You may have won me over this time with your good-natured banter about coffee and human togetherness and your vast musical talent guys, but c’mon - don’t push it. 

 

As I mused way back in July, the extended vocal cuts led here by Chicagoan percussionist/singer Kahil El’Zabar often veer more toward a kind of spaced out, discombobulated soul than to anything in the jazz canon, with the simple hypnotic rhythms of El’Zabor and bassist Emma Dayhuff backing up the band leader’s resonant, mantra-like, sometimes entirely non-verbal, incantations, resulting in a sound which perhaps recalls the methodology of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ taken to it’s furthest extreme, or perhaps Gil Scott Heron getting waa-aay out there on a jazz tip, if he’d stuck to pot rather than hitting the hard stuff.

At the same time though, as I’ve lived with this record over the past six months or so, it’s the instrumental cuts I come back to the most. Side # 3’s ‘Katon’ in particular spends quite a while digging into territory not too distant from the slow burn, ambient minimalism of Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, until saxophonist David Murray eventually weighs in with some stark, unmistakably Trane-like tenor ruminations, paying heed to the feather-soft groove even as he briefly tilts in a considerably more fearsome direction - a trend which is furthered, naturally enough, on side # 4’s more conventionally lyrical ‘Trane in Mind’ - as knock-out a tribute to the big man as you’re likely to hear anywhere in the current musical firmament. 

 

Why, after all these years, does ‘The Devil Rides Out’, an insufferably boring novel written by arch-conservative imperialist blowhard Dennis Wheatley in 19…, retain such an irresistible aesthetic appeal, living on in the minds of horror/weird fiction aficionados like a rich bouquet of combined old book smell, empty church dust and ceremonial sulphur..?

Damned if I know, but Hammer’s ever-wonderful 1968 movie adaptation no doubt helps, as does this more recent ‘soundtrack’ to the novel offered up by Tom Mcdowell, aka Dream Division.

Of all the quote-unquote “dungeon synth” releases I sampled last year in fact, this one strikes me as by far the strongest. Not only does Mcdowell succeed in wringing exactly the right tones of comforting, TV/VHS-fogged dread and fascination from his wheezing, hissing analogue equipment, but he also brings a strong melodic sensibility to the material, filling the album with memorable, earworm-heavy numbers which would certainly not have disgraced the professional-yet-impoverished band of film composers who first minted this particular sound back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Combine this with a keen appreciation of the intangible / irresistible ‘feel’ of the material he is plundering for inspiration, and Mcdowell has really created an all-time, party rockin’ classic for the world’s second-hand bookshop haunting creeps.

 

Single-handedly making the concept of “stoner rock” suddenly seem like a good idea again, this Vienna-based group’s shamelessly indulgent assemblage of gargantuan / Sleep-worthy riffs and foot-on-monitor solos, served up with just a touch of bonged out weirdness, has rarely travelled far from my turntable in 2020. Seriously - super-massive rock fun with real longevity right here. Do yourself a favour today and check it out.

Here is some further blather from way back in the carefree days of Feb 2020: 

 “‘Raging Mammoth’! ‘Shaking Pyramid’! Yes, these are the kind of things pieces of music like this should be called, and I commend artist Sandra Havik for her valiant attempts to literally illustrate these concepts on the album’s front cover. Side 2’s ‘Monolith’ is dutifully depicted on the back cover meanwhile, whilst the accompanying track mixes things up somewhat, heading in a more trad metal direction, bringing in NWBHM-ish harmonic leads and moving from curious, almost jazzy/modal passages early on toward some positively Maiden-esque adventures in mid-tempo, dragon-slaying guitar heroism. Probably the all-round best cut here, it’s pretty damn immense.” 

 

Making her second collaborative appearance on this year’s list, Kryssi Battalene (Head Room/Mountain Movers) here lends her guitar and vocals talents to former Mininokoto / LSD March frontman Kawaguchi Masami’s New Rock Syndicate, and, if the shorter, more garage-inclined numbers which begin the resulting LP perhaps don’t come off quite as well as they could, tracks like sitar-enhanced slow-burn epic ‘Sunday Afternoon’, the shimmering, scorched earth drama of ‘Shadow of the Earth’ and the churning, bad vibes jamming of ‘The Beginning’ and ‘Pieces of You’ all remain absolutely sublime.

Even more-so than with his previous bands, Kawaguchi seems intent here on digging deep into the legacy of late ‘80s legends White Heaven, tacking close to that band’s gospel of lysergic songcraft and elegiac guitar heroics, seasoned with a touch of AMT’s show-boating exotica, whilst Battalene for her part brings a more Bardo/MBV-like sense of blissed out pedalboard oblivion to proceedings, birthing beautific, timeless, trans-pacific psychedelic rock of the very highest calibre; just a sky-scraping, spirit-nourishing triumph of beautific noise, miraculously still available on wax to U.S.-based readers for the price of a six pack plus postage. 

  

From July 2020:

“As ever, it’s difficult to really put into words the unique amalgam that comprises Obnox’s sound, but nonetheless, let’s take a deep breath and try again. Mixing up lo-fi cut-up noise, rust-belt garage-punk, mutant p-funk derivations, ghostly regional/outsider soul and aggro-laden, street level hip-hop, ‘Savage Raygun’ makes for an exhilarating tour through the treacherous back alleys of American music, all mixed down with a chopped n’ screwed, basement tape-splicin’ aesthetic that makes the album’s presence on shiny, newly pressed vinyl feel kind of incongruous.

That said though, this is still perhaps a slightly more – cough –‘accessible’ take on the Obnox ideal than we’ve been presented with before, dialling back on the hyper-aggressive saturation of earlier releases, even as Thomas remains an elusive presence within his own music, his vocals often remaining distant and translucent as he slyly works earworms and familiar phrases from semi-well known songs in his material, leaving us trying to source them in the fog of our own memories like some form of archaic, pre-industrial sampling. The exception of course is on the full-on hip-hop cuts, where he’s upfront and in our grill, spitting as angry and unhinged as our stupid white asses could wish for, milling down decades of uncouth working class discontent for some implacably affirmative, ugly shit flow goodness.

All of the deep, strange threads Lamont Thomas is exploring and tearing through here seem to come together, just before the end of the record, on the supremely titled ‘Young Neezy’, looping an ancient tape of Neil’s ‘Southern Man’ riff and firing it straight off into the resentful depths of twisted r’n’b oblivion. It’s pretty inspired. A few years on from Obnox coining the phrase ‘America in a Blender’ on his mutant, malfunctioning non-“free jazz” LP [‘Templo dol Solido’, 2018], he’s still busy making supremely bitter-sweet lemonade from that terrifying concept.”

 

Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP from 2018 is one of the records I’ve played most over the past few years, and undoubtedly the one which has had the biggest impact on my listening… so of course it's a no brainer that a further disc culled from the same trans-coastal / transatlantic sessions was going to find itself sitting pretty high up on this 2020 list.

Unlike the earlier LPs, tracks recorded in different cities with different line-ups are mixed up willy-nilly here, arguably resulting in a somewhat more bracing and unpredictable listen, but McCraven’s intense, skittering electronica-influenced drum style remains consistent throughout, lending the music a unified pulse even as the textures and atmospheres change on a dime.

Most of the pieces here are quite brief, with some sounding like repetitive / water-treading segments excised from longer jams, which perhaps explains why they didn’t quite make the cut on the first two LPs, but even in its more quotidian moments, this music retains a floating, blissful sense of infectious positivity, and highlights, of course, remain plentiful.

Several cuts from the hallowed (by me at least) New York session appear to be pieces of the same tight, rhythmic workout, foregrounding Joel Ross’s vibraphone alongside backing from the aforementioned Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger, whilst ‘Half Steppin’, recorded in London with Soweto Kinch (sax) and Kamaal Williams (keys) is an altogether more hair-raising piece of work, with what sounds like a heavily processed and/or electronically-generated beat bringing a frantic, almost jungle-like feel emphasised by distant, juddering bass frequencies and strange, droning chords picked out by Williams.

Two further London cuts featuring a more trad sax/keys/bass line up (courtesy of Nubya Garcia, Ashley Henry and Daniel Casimir respectively) find McCraven's polyphonous beatdowns sometimes threatening to drown out his collaborators, but a louche slide toward the ol ‘smoky groove’ pocket eventually wins the day, with some lovely work in particular from Henry on Fender Rhodes.

Meanwhile, the Chicago material here is excellent too, with Tomeka Reid’s cello adding a baleful quality to proceedings, as Shabaka Hutchings’ rich, Trane-esque tone alternately locks into and drowsily pulls away from McCraven's meticulously detailed, double-time beat - but my pick for the absolute best stuff this time around comes from Los Angeles.

As the distinctive creepy-crawl of Jeff Parker’s guitar signals a shift to the West Coast, the combo of ‘Universal Being pt2’ and ‘Butterss Fly’ (named for bassist Anna Butterss) proves absolutely stunning, perhaps a peak moment of this entire project in fact, with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s violin cooing some some bird of paradise as Josh Johnson's alto rides the tightly-wound rhythm set by McCraven and Parker, eventually folding out into a beautiful cat’s cradle of interlocking, ‘Bitches Brew’-esque textures… oh man, it’s a shame they couldn’t have kept this one going for hours.

But, we’re reaching the end of the final side by this point, so needs must, and, back to London, Soweto Kinch shows us ‘The Way Home’ - a big, bold South African style melodic theme, played in a duo with McCraven, cheerfully waving us off into the sunrise of the perilously uncertain future we all now find ourselves stuck in. 

 

Year on year, I find myself feeling ever more distraught when the moment comes for me to vainly try, yet again, to find a way to convey the kind of magic routinely bottled by Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton and Tony Buck whenever and wherever they convene to take care of Necks business.

These days at least, I can merely point to the bandcamp embed above and let more patient readers discover a way in for themselves, but, for those unwilling or unable to do so, I can at least suggest that, exhibiting a characteristically zen-like sense of internal symmetry (three tracks of equal length, three musicians), CD-only album ‘Three’ represents some of the band’s strongest work in years (which is going some).

Mixing restrained, ruminative piano and bass excursions with a chaotic, rotor-blade like clamour of disembodied percussion, ‘Bloom’ and ‘Further’ are both - and it makes my soul wither just to say this, but no alternatives immediately present themselves - classic Necks. The former leaves strange, distorted, guitar-like overdubs churning deep in the background, cymbal hits ringing through infinite space and fizzing, climactic organ chords occasionally rising up like fragments of Chicago house overheard from the wrong side of thick concrete wall. The latter meanwhile is a particularly special aural tranquilizer dart, tidal organ and string textures drifting against the frantic rattle of Buck’s bells and chimes as Swanson locks into an exquisite example of the kind of slow, cyclical groove which defined the band’s early work back in the ‘90s/‘00s.

By contrast, middle track ‘Lovelock’, named in tribute to recently deceased Celibate Rifles frontman Damien Lovelock, proves harrowing stuff - a dry gulch twenty minutes of exhausted, nocturnal dream-atmos which I’d characterise as ‘bereft’, but for the fact that that would imply a level of emotional manipulation mercifully alien to The Necks pointedly abstract/subjective methodology. 

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Labels: best of 2020, Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger, Dream Division, Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove, Kawaguchi Masami, Kryssi Battalene, Makaya McCraven, Naujawanan Baidar, Obnox, Ozo, Ryte, The Necks

My gosh, I am SO SORRY for the delays in getting this list sorted out.

What can I say? Work has been ridiculous. Life has been only slightly less ridiculous. Who knew that you could be so busy without leaving home.

I’ve considered abandoning this list, or just posting the rest of it as a straight up 30 to 1 without written content, in order to allow me to move on to some more relevant and rewarding content-creation. But no. So much good music came my way in 2020, it would be a travesty of the blog’s loose principles not to follow through and give it all a good shout - so on we plough.

If you missed part # 1, please don’t forget to catch up with it here. (And again - please don’t take the numbers to heart; they make these things easier to manage, but are basically pretty arbitrary. If it’s on this list, I really liked it - end of.) 

From September:

Allen’s defiantly Out There guitar-work is of course a consistent highlight, abetting technically accomplished Groundhogs-esque shred with some truly unhinged pedal-board demolition work, spurting malfunctioning dot matrix laser goo all over ‘Six Six Sigma’, and doing a pretty good impression of a garden gate being abused by a variety of power tools on… well, all three tracks really, now that I come to think of it.” 

 

Full appreciation of this double LP set from Manchester-based trumpet player Halsall and his backing band represents a bit of a challenge for me vis-à-vis my on-going struggle to widen the parameters of my listening. By which I mean, whenever I sling one of its sides on the turntable, some part of my brain immediately revolts, informing me that this basically sounds like an MOR rehash of the kind of stuff Don Cherry and Alice Coltrane were doing back in the ‘70s, with all the edges painstakingly filed off, leaving behind a brand of spiritual jazz suspiciously devoid of fire, challenge or experimentation.

The remainder of my brain however is forced to cop that the results sound ever so nice regardless, encouraging me to sink into the groove of Gavin Barras and Alan Taylor’s tidal rhythms, to appreciate the plain beauty of Maddie Herbert’s quivering, bead curtain harp strums, and to engage with the restrained, Miles-esque monologues of Halsall’s horn work.

Do what extent does music need an ‘edge’, I’m forced to wonder. Where does this relentless demand for sonic aggression and discomfort come from, and how has it become so completely embedded in my psyche? Ultimately I suppose, different kinds of music are needed for different times, to fulfill different purposes. When my energy levels are higher, when I’m out and about, pursuing my own real world objectives, much of ‘Salute To The Sun’, with it’s bamboo partition yoga studio vibes and ‘Mindfulness Meditations’ (actual song title - side # 3) sounds like absolute anathema.

Fact is though, I do not have the kind of energy (never mind aggression) that I used to. Give me a year of sitting at home, conducting business from a desk four feet from my bed, quiet streets, empty skies, and the multi-faceted stresses and uncertainties of global pandemic and economic collapse, and the winsome, overpoweringly pleasant rise and fall of Halsall’s ensemble starts to sound very comforting indeed, thank you kindly (and I do thank them kindly). 

 

Comprising a single, forty minute improvisation, ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ finds this Portuguese duo building from a slow start - seagull cries and sinister, sustained organ chords creating a pensive, vangelis-like atmos - before voudon junk-can percussion, ecstatic, canine cries, questing clusters of Jajouka-like horn riffage and a forboding, perpetually rising string drone usher in an engrossing, hypnotic journey to the heart of some post-apocalyptic wasteland in which the animal skin and war-paint clad ‘Mad Max’ bikers have long since expired and turned to dust. More fun than it sounds. 

 

From June 2020: 

“As much as I’ve been enjoying Sarah Davachi’s work recently, her pursuit of monotonal melancholia can sometimes tend to get a bit, well, monotonous after a while – which makes this collaboration from French ambient artist Ariel Kalma feel like just the ticket. Herein, Kalma adds some welcome bursts of melodic and textural colour to Davachi’s pure-tone excursions, complimenting her quietly monolithic, largely synth-based work with the sound of tanpura, harmonium, slightly different synths and Vangelis-esque echo sax.

The simple fact that there are two people working together here helps cut against the barren loneliness that has sometimes made Davachi’s solo releases feel slightly unapproachable, making ‘Intemporel’ stand out as one of her sunnier, more optimistic recordings, with the sublime ‘Adieu de Vie’ in particular sinking into a warm steam bath of exactly the kind of ingratiating, escapist psychedelia I’m hard-wired to enjoy, electronics and delays burbling away like a morning chorus of robot birdies above a lightly LSD-brushed alien onsen resort.” 

 

Emma-Jean Thackray’s records to date have been consistently fun and forward-thinking, but this EP, released last March, is one of my favourites.

The opening ‘Rain Dance / Wisdom’ in particular powered me through much of 2020’s voluntarily locked down spring/summer, a sublime full band recording with gentle, sundazed Rhodes organ and echoed-out trumpet weaving around some of Thackray’s characteristically thunderous, distorted Sousaphone bass tones (played on this occasion by ben Kelly) and a clipped, head-noddin’, hi-hat heavy drum beat, courtesy of Dougal Taylor. Fantastic, effects-heavy production here, making a pretty much definitive exemplar of London’s all-directions-at-once, psych-tinged contemporary jazz sound. Splendid stuff. 

 

The back story behind the LP is pretty convoluted (see extended description on bandcamp page for more), but it basically boils down to Drew Gardner and Jesse Sheppard - who comprise instrumental guitar duo Elkhorn - becoming trapped in a New York apartment with their similarly inclined associate Turner Williams a couple of years back, as an unforeseen blizzard raged outside.

And, under such circumstances, what’s a bunch of pickers gonna do, beside pick? Record, that’s what. Though rooted in the post-Fahey ‘American Primitive’ tradition (never quite felt comfortable with that term, but there you go), the players happily see fit to expand considerably beyond that acoustic / folk-based MO, engaging - so one supposes - with the icy conditions out on the street to tease out an album’s worth of cold and lonely string-based meditations from a palette which includes 12 string acoustic, fuzz-toned electric and - courtesy of Mr Williams - electric bouzouki and shahi baaja.

Side # 1 finds Gardner initially dropping blissful, Garcia-type modal leads over Sheppard’s baleful, low key acoustic thrum, as Williams adds a burble of heavily effected weirdness to the mix, making for an agreeably psychedelic nest of interlocking string textures. It’s on side # 2 however that things really get going, as the tambora-like drone of the shahi baaja crashes head-first into some sheets of fuzz from Gardner, his pedal hitting that rather charming straight-into-practice-amp-at-living-room-volume sound which I suspect recording engineers would usually have moved heaven & earth to avoid under more conventional circumstances.

Though Sheppard’s 12-string maintains a lonely, falling snowflake vigil throughout, ‘The Storm Sessions’ nonetheless comprises a happy motherlode of loved up, multi-layered string jamming which, for me at least, hits a similar sweet spot to that mined so beautifully by Desmadrados Soldados de Ventura a few years back - which you can take as a fairly gargantuan recommendation, should you have a mind to. 

 

From way back in Feb 2020:

“So, Louise and Morgan range out beyond (what I assume to be) the more conventional, song-based folk of their own groups, embracing a woozier, more free-form approach, whilst [Kryssi] Battalene for her part nixes the PSF-styled noise-rock maximalism of her playing in the aforementioned bands, instead threading her way into the gentler, more delicate fabric favoured by her collaborators. Applying a variety of more intuitive and low-key guitar/effects treatments to the tracks here, she helps bring the underlying psychedelia of the enterprise simmering nicely to the surface, finally breaking out with some tormented, dissonant racket towards the end of the track-list, on what is probably my favourite track here, the mantra-like forest mulch trip-out of ‘Emerald Ash’.

Prior to that however, beautiful heavy tremolo strumming adds shimmering depths to the otherwise fairly trad country-folk of ‘Gathering’, whilst strange, throbbing delay pedal conjurations provide an ominous bed for ‘Squash Vine’s similarly healthy, no nonsense indie-folk take on free-from jamming, allowing it to grow into something rather spectacular across its six minute duration - a winning combo of elements repeated on the record’s slightly more tangible centre-piece, ‘Cherry Tree Carol’, whose mix of earnest, trad-arr vocal recital and more rock inclined backing might perhaps strike a distant chord with fans of Shirley Collins & The Albion Country Band’s revered ‘No Roses’.” 

 

Now here’s a funny thing. Way back at the start of last year, a representative of Slum of Legs very kindly dropped me a line to let me know they - finally, after about five years of silence (but no worries, band people all know how that goes) - had an album on the way. I was told that they were planning a tour for November, and I thought, boy, that’s really planning ahead, but it will be great to see them play again, despite the wait. LITTLE DID WE KNOW, etc etc.

Anyway - we still have the record. And the record still sounds great, so let’s count our blessings.

From March 2020:

“..for the moment, let’s just say that the six members of Slum of Legs still sound like an unruly gaggle of entirely disparate, equally strong voices, all pulling in different directions whilst still somehow coalescing into some unholy, unified whole that’s almost, well, pop, Jim, but not as we know it. I hate reviews that end with “For Fans of…” lists with a passion, but if you can find me another band somewhere in the world whose hypothetical list might include The Mekons, Broadcast, The Raincoats, Marianne Faithful, Rudimentary Peni and Fad Gadget, I’d probably really like to hear them. Thanks in advance.” 

 

Recorded live-in-studio in 2018, the simple arithmetic underpinning this collaboration between San Francisco-based guitar/drums duo Numinous Eye and Tokyo-based guitar/guitar duo Suishou No Fune, thus brings us a free-from splurge of moody, maxed out guitar/guitar/guitar/drums rumination - and you’d better believe those are the kind of odds we’re always happy to stake an LP’s worth of dough against round these parts.

As per the Elkhorn recorded I waxed lyrical on above, storm and blizzard are very much the kind of sonic metaphors being conjured here, but this time around it’s thunder instead of snow, black waves crashing ‘gainst a blighted, unwelcoming shore, as the guitar trio’s amps gradually fire up, reverb knobs pointed safely t’ward the east as judicious boot-clicks on a few suitably scary looking silver boxes bring us a damage-dealing buzzsaw growl worthy of the band’s name.

Though the players seem to be sounding each other out with some sustained, high pitched solo work on the record’s more low key opening cut, any sense of ego or individual dynamism soon disappears here, subsumed within a collective whole of eerie, shuddering yet oddly triumphant noise, rather akin to a totally unglued Cheater Slicks ploughing off on an SF ballroom tip, or Fushitsusha taking it easy with a mug of cocoa at their rural weekend hideaway, peeking at the inclement conditions outside and thanking the powers that (airb&)be for their well-worn sofa and functioning fireplace. About as cozy as soul-wrenching electrified skree gets, in other words. 

 

From Nov 2020:

To some extent recalling the more militant and unglued corners of Art Ensemble of Chicago’s discography, one imagines this must have put the wind up some segments of the refined European festival crowd presumably assembled for this show, but, any walk-outs or deserters from the concert space may well have been forced to ask themselves - if you don't want to listen to an African-American woman speaking her mind, what the hell are you doing at a jazz festival?

Contemplation of that question, to my mind, provides an immediate validation of Dawid’s confrontational - genuinely rather “‘punk’” in fact - performance style, and needless to say, those jazzbos who did stay on for the duration will have found themselves richly rewarded, in pure muso terms just as much as on the more visceral/emotional/existential side of things.

As unconventional as their approach may have been here, Dawid and her band are certainly no slouches on the technical front. The extended interplay between Dawid’s clarinet and Xristian Espinoza’s sax on the loping grooves of ‘London’, and her keyboard improvisations on ‘Black Family’, are absolutely inspired, whilst the smouldering, nocturnal heft of the piano/horn intro to ‘We are Starzz’ is just plain sublime. Enhanced by wild, rhythmic glossolalia and cosmic synth swirls, ‘We Hereby Declare The African Look’ and ‘Melo Deez from Heab’N’ meanwhile present bizarre, sci-fi groove-outs worthy of either Funkadelic’s most errant, acid soaked excursions or Sun Ra’s most wonkily accessible ‘80s pop crossover work (depending on which way you look at it), whilst the rolling rhythmic backbone provided by South African drummer (and bandleader) Asher Gamedze and lodestone bassist Dr Adam Zanolini is exceptional throughout.” 

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To be continued ASAP….

Labels: Angel Bat Dawid, Anthroprophh, best of 2020, Elkhorn, Emma-Jean Thackray, Matthew Halsall, Paisiel, Sarah Davachi, Sarah Louise Sally Anne Morgan & Kryssi B, Slum of Legs, The Noise Birds