Finally! It only one bloody quarter of 2021 to get this summation of 2020 done, but putting time aside to listen to all of these records again has been well worth it.

(Parts # 1,2 and 3 of this list can be enjoyed here, here and here.) 

 

Although they’ve each been plying their trade for half a lifetime by this point, the work of current or former Chicagoans Rob Mazurek (piccolo trumpet / electronics) and Jeff Parker (guitar) were big discoveries for me personally during 2020 - see below - and this hugely enjoyable joint from their long-running collaborative venture (previously a duo, trio, etc) played a big role in putting me on the right track.

If certain of the other jazz-based LPs on this list prioritise texture, production and ‘feel’ over straight up musicality, the no nonsense recording aesthetic employed by the quartet here should, by rights, serve to take things back in the direction of good ol’ hard scrabble, with a cold, unadorned, rather trebley room sound which in theory leaves nowhere for the players to hide… but, being an imaginative bunch with a collective CV which ranges far and wide across genre boundaries, they’re soon busy erecting foliage, throwing up smoke, pulling some shit with mirrors, and generally doing anything in their power to avoid a predictable jazz quartet session.

Masurek pushes his trumpet through a barrage of effects, sounding almost like some grand-standing psyche/noise guitarist on fusion-fried opener ‘Orgasm’ (ooh-er), but it’s the following ‘Strange Wing’ which is the real stand-out here - a beautiful, rather Necks-ish tour through a cave of haunted, reverberating stasis and carefully sculpted feedback, Josh Johnson’s lolloping, McBee-ish bassline maintaining a soft, secure pulse throughout.

One of several cuts in which percussionist Chad Taylor abandons the drum set, ‘All the Bells’ gives us a good scramble through his toybox of tinkling, scraping bits and bobs, over which Mazurek lonesomely solos to his heart’s content, whilst ‘Unique Spiral’ cooks up another neat, fusion-y groove before sinking into eerie, rather abstract realm as Johnson’s anchoring keyboard line cuts out leaving the other players momentarily adrift.

‘Good Days (for Anna Lee)’ by contrast is a lyrical slice of old school, melancholic jazz, with Parker in characteristically exquisite, rain-against-the-window-pane form, digging into some nice tremolo as he duets softly with Mazurek’s stark, Miles-ish trumpet work. Also on a trad tip, ‘Batida’ a great, feel-good groove, briefly digging into laidback jazz-funk territory which wouldn’t sound out of place on one of those ‘90s ‘Pulp Fusion’ comps, whilst album closer ‘Westview’ is a legit street-funk burner, Parker cranking up the gain slightly as he and Mazurek takes turns to kick up sparks across Johnson & Taylor’s flick knife backing. Who’d have thought this bunch of cerebral, Tortoise-affiliated types would have it in ‘em for such a rumble? Wow.

Not everything here really works so well - thumb piano / woodblock duet ‘Lome’ I can take or leave - but for the most part, this is a wildly varied, hugely rewarding listen, turning both conventional and exploratory strategies on their head with such regularity that it’s difficult to tell which is which by the time we hit the half-way point. 

 

 

Throughout 2020, I was consistently knocked out by the strength and consistency of this Alicante-based band’s epic, bucolic psyche-prog / stoner metal vision. And, better yet, their two LPs can be interlinked, front side to back side, to reveal bigger versions of the two excellent cover paintings [see explanatory illustration below]! This makes me outrageously happy, more than justifying a double dose of international postage fees.

Reviewing the first LP back in Feb 2020, I did sayeth:

“..infusing their consummate stoner/space-rock with a heroic dose of pre-‘Dark Side..’ Floyd / early King Crimson styled compositional ambience, which pleases me yet further, [Domo] fool me for forty-odd minutes into imagining all is right with the world.

For, as long as the dusty string/brass/choral textures drift past like a twilight frolic through Bosch’s Garden on the opening ‘Oxymoron’, languid bass walkin’ the dog until those pyramid-robbin’, Eastern-tinged riffs crash down at precisely the right moment for an extended interplanetary grind on second cut ‘Astródomo’ … we have no cause to worry.

Though they may initially seem to be lurking somewhere on the same general vicinity as Denmark’s Causa Sui and the El Paraiso label, aesthetically-speaking, Domo achieve a mellower, more approachable sound here, digging deeper into the feel (rather than merely form) of their vintage influences, leaving their music enriched by fading echoes of bucolic, analogue-era psych alongside their sinister metal void-gazin’ and, crucially, exhibiting a greater veneration for the supremacy of The Almighty Groove.

If there’s a lot of prog in the mix, well, rest assured, this is prog in the best possible sense of the world, valuing a sense of collective expression over individual ego-trips from the players (though there are, naturally, plenty of ripping solos to enjoy too), making – to my ears at least – for a supremely generous quartet of semi-side long jams, epic as you like whilst keeping a careful check on the bombast, making sure heads keep nodding all the way to the silver gates of infinity. (The cyclical riff on side 2’s ‘Rituel del Sol’ is particularly immense in this respect.)”

The second LP (released in November) is pretty similar, but arguably even better. 

 

 

Of all the once-commercially-viable outfits who crawled from the dumpster fire of the grim, post-Britpop late ‘90s, Cornershop, I think, are the group who have aged most gracefully, their records (old and new alike) remaining rewarding, fun and culturally resonant, long after most of their original contemporaries have slunk off into the twilight of nostalgia tour obsolescence.

Although I was never a big, CD-owning fan back in the day, whenever I’ve heard a Cornershop song pop up on the radio in subsequent years, I’ve been increasingly inclined to think, yeah, this band were/are really good; a happy, affirmative and unconventional presence in the otherwise gulch dry indie-mainstream. Hearing a few immediately appealing / actually-pretty-fantastic advance singles from their new record early in 2020, and learning that they’d gifted their latest work with the simple yet perfect title ‘England is a Garden’, I thought to myself, yes, now more than ever is the time to embrace Cornershop.

And, happily, that turned out to be a very easy task to accomplish. Front to back, the double LP sprawl of ‘England is a Garden’ is a fantastic listen. Though the band’s currently favoured combo of loping, break-beat-ish rhythms, thundering T-Rex guitar riffs and miscellaneous Bollywood / jazz-funk exotica may sound dated or questionable on paper, in practice they pull it off so well, incorporating such a winningly melodic pop sensibility, that all it takes is a few rays of sunshine outside and this thing sounds fresh as a fucking daisy.

For all that though, there’s always something strange and gnomic about Tjinder Singh’s lyrics, bringing a distant sense of menace to even the cheeriest of proceedings. Like the Late Mark E. Smith, his proclamations have tendency to be be both highly specific and endlessly inscrutable, in terms of both basic comprehension and interpretation (is he really singing “..aliens use midlands as drop forge / that makes midlands England glow” on ‘No Rock: Save in Roll’?). Still burying and obscuring his off-kilter sloganeering within the mix, he remains an intriguing lyricist / frontperson after all these years.

Apparently practicing a say-what-you-see principle, a fetishistic excitement with the nuts and bolts of recording technology seems to run through the album’s lyrics (“track wire to the target speaker… amplifier to the echo chamber…”), which I always appreciate, mixed haphazardly with disjointed imagery which seeks to speak in fragmentary, haphazard fashion of Caribbean slavery, domestic racial discrimination, long-lost British cultural/musical history and goodness knows what else, without ever nixing the essential pop fun of the enterprise.

Like Smith, Singh also retains a propensity for incorporating uneasy / attention-grabbing language into his songs, though his efforts toward reclaiming / reinterpreting it are… a little more convincing, shall we say. Certainly, it’s difficult to think of another musical ensemble on earth who could record a reggae-infused track named ‘Everywhere That W*g Army Roam’ and emerge with something neither musically nor ideologically objectionable. (As he repeatedly reminds us on the wistful ‘Cash Money’, “..shit gets complicated”.)

At the risk of blatantly projecting and/or getting a bit heart-on-sleeve, Cornershop’s sound - as signalled by their exultant album title - is one which speaks to me of all the things I love about this weird and tarnished country I call home, near-impossible though they may be to see at the moment, as we stare down the barrel of an unprecedentedly bleak future. Though I doubt it as anything like the band’s intention, listening to this record reminds me that, wherever you look in this land, you can still find good people living good lives. Cultures being swapped and intertwined across garden fences; kids of multitudinous backgrounds running through parks and town centres on sunny Saturdays, making their own adventures; dads in flat caps playing dub down the pub on a Thursday night.

It’s a nebulous set of largely unmapped things and foggy notions which we need to try really hard to remember, and to not take for granted, right now, lest we throw the baby out with the fetid, post-br**it bathwater and surrender to the hellhole vision relentlessly propagated by our ‘leaders’ and their media boosters. For me at least, ‘England is a Garden’ really helps in this regard. 

 

 

I’ve enthused plenty about Grey Hairs’ studio output on this blog in recent years, so I’ll try not to repeat myself, but, good as the band’s recordings may be, they’ve always been left in the shade by the strength of their live performances. Ergo, this live album, recorded back in very different world on Halloween night 2019, is, by definition, their best record to date.

Had it seen release during most of the years preceding 2020, it could thus have been number one with a bullet on one of these lists - but, as has been have noted, competition over the past 18 months or so has been pretty intense, so Britain’s Best Rock Band (I’ll award them with a tin badge confirming this upon request) will have to make do with a paltry #7 this time around I’m afraid.

It has sometimes been brought to my attention that there are fans of rock music out there who do not like live albums. I know -- crazy, right? God only knows what their problem is, but I don’t get it. I mean, clearly, in most cases amplified music comes to life when rendered at teeth-rattling volume in direct communion with its intended audience. Why would you not want to hear that scenario captured on tape and reproduced through your stereo? Beats me.

As I see it, the only real negative re: live albums is the variable recording quality traditionally associated with such ventures - but if that’s yr main concern, well, you’re on safe ground with this one.

For those unfamiliar with the set up at Nottingham’s admirable DIY venue/studio J.T. Soar, it essentially comprises a respectably sixed live room downstairs, with a short flight of stairs leading up to a fully kitted out studio control room on the floor above, thus making it the perfect location in which to record a live album. With resident engineer Phil Booth at the desk, the sound here is exceptional, essentially combining the clarity of a studio session with the energy and atmos of a three-beers-in headlining live set. What more could you ask for?

Still one of the best riffs, and best set-openers, of recent years, ‘Hydropona’ sounds like it could level brick walls at 400 yards (so let us be thankful J.T. Soar is apparently made of sterner stuff); monstrous, head-banging joy. At the poppier end of the band’s repertoire, ‘Backwards’ is reborn a terrifying, slinky beast in its natural habitat, whilst ‘Piss Transgressor’ by contrast is more feral than ever, and encore/closer ‘The Chin’ is exultant, half-cut chaos. Applying the old “good song / good sound / good performance” triangle for identifying good records, this one aces it. A default winner on all levels.

 

 

An extraordinary statement of intent, South African drummer Asher Gamedze’s first(?) extended outing as band leader is easily one of the best jazz releases in heard in 2020 - which is going some, given that I tuned into more great, newly released jazz records in 2020 than in the earlier years of the 21st century combined.

It’s difficult to really get much down on paper for this once without lapsing into breathless hyperbole, but, betting straight down to business, the side-long ‘State of Emergence Suite’, (along with side # 3’s ‘Eternality’) present rich, brooding canvasses of stark, somewhat Ayler/Shepp-esque improvisation with Buddy Wells’ rich tenor sax tone centre-stage, delivering harrowing, heavy weight melodic themes but never quite settling into any kind of comfortable, repetitive pattern, leaving the rest of the group anxious, unglued and sparking with energy, even as pace remains punishingly slow / contemplative, anchored by Gamedze’s frantic, skittering cymbal work and Thembinkosi Mavimbela’s heavy, exploratory bass pulse.

The gentle, funereal horns which open side # 2’s ‘Siyabulela’ carry the weight of an immense sadness, bass and cymbals setting a waves-crashing-‘pon-the-shore pace, even before Nono Nkoane’s voice enters the picture. Reedy, vibrant, fragile and pure, it’s as inexplicably moving, soulful as any piece of music you will have heard anywhere last year. I have no idea what kind of feeling or landscape, what kind of real world circumstance, this music seeks to invoke, but regardless, it’s an incredible piece of work - a real spine-chiller. It may not be the longest, loudest or most attention-grabbing track on these LPs, but it’s definitely the one that spoke to me above all others.

Celebratory hoedown ‘Hope in Azania’ may closely recall the kind of warm, South African spirit showcased on records by Louis Moholo-Moholo and his Blue Notes/Brotherhood of Breath compatriots back in the day, but nonetheless, it’s a sense of melancholy which continues to predominate, particularly on the more experimental ‘The Speculative Fourth’, which finds Nkoane’s vocals duetting in weird, atonal counter-point with Wells’ and Robin Fassie-Kock’s horns, recalling some lost Carla Bley freakout, but never entirely shaking that sense of sun-baked, ‘Sketches of Spain’-type rumination. 

 

 

Would you believe, then I started seeing Rob Mazurek’s name popping up on mailing list emails from assorted record labels a few years back, I mistakenly scanned his name as Ray Mazurek, organist / profiteer-in-chief for The Doors? “Jeez, is that old codger still around, trying to make hip jazz records..”, etc. Maybe Rob’s got that a lot over the years. I dunno. [Ray Mazurek actually died in 2013, so just leave it there please. - tasteless tangents Ed.] Ok, sorry.

Anyway, blurry-eyed error duly corrected, belatedly familiarising myself with some of the recent work of prolific Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist ROB Mazurek has proved to be one of the more rewarding music-based activities I undertook in 2020, not only vis-a-vis the Chicago Underground Quartet record discussed above, but also with regard to this startlingly ambitious, frankly mind-blowing LP of broadly jazz-derived compositional music, quietly issued in November by label-of-the-moment International Anthem.

Realised with the assistance of a monster, all-star ensemble of musicians associated with the label (Tomeka Reid (cello), Joel Ross (vibes) and Jaimie Branch (trumpet) are all present and correct, alongside Mazurek’s long-time collaborators Jeff Parker (guitar), Chad Taylor (drums) and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass)), ‘Dimensional Stardust’ is… really something, let’s put it that way.

Perhaps I’m just losing my freshly-blown mind here, but album opener ‘Sun Core Tet (Parable 99)’ puts me in mind more than anything of a very particular aesthetic which started to coalesce in the late 1950s, when the innovations of modern jazz started to cross-pollinate with the work of more adventurous movie soundtrack composers. Aside from the skittering, boom-bap beat which clearly marks it out as contemporary, it’s easy to imagine the track’s stark, Hermann-esque strings, dexterous post-bop bass runs, eerie, pastoral flute leads (courtesy Nicole Mitchell - very much a MVP contender here) and (yes) gratuitous bongos playing over the modish, Saul Bass-designed title sequence of some latter day Otto Preminger thriller.

Which is no bad thing in itself, but, as the record progresses, listeners had better prepare to move from b&w to Fuji-film colour, as the sensory floodgates open wide and we’re hit in the face with some hella ‘2001’ shit. Though it may be trendy once again for jazz records to decribe themselves as ‘cosmic’, it remains a blast to discover one which - as per the ensemble name and album title - embraces that label literally, and with starry-eyed gusto to spare.

As crystalline strings surge, wild woodwinds trill and electronics fizz and crackle, the whole ensemble pulse with a kind of freaky, joyous, utopian groove rarely encountered within such carefully composed/rehearsed material. Just check the moment when Parker hits some wild, radio-fogged fuzz pedal to pull off a wild, angular solo, mid-way through ‘The Careening Prism Within (Parable 43)’, pulling us into a kind of chaotic, poly-rhythmic wormhole that could almost pass for a long-lost extract from The Boredoms’ ‘VisionCreationNewSun’, before the cinematic strings return again to assert a shaky sense of ritualistic order to the subsequent track. Jeez.

Some weird, weightless dance-of-the-statues amid neo-classical ruins on a distant star comes to mind, as Mazurek’s trumpet (or is it Branch? - not sure) gently aches across side # 2’s ‘Parable of Inclusion’, before the vertiginous, brightly-hued feather dance of the album’s title track ushers us through some frighteningly intense, Sun Ra-mediated stargate voyage to multi-faceted pastures unknown.

Judiciously integrated into the musical flow, and mixed low amid crackling phone-line distortion, Damon Locks’ spoken word interjections provide a fantastic counterpoint to Mazurek’s instrumental reveries, mixing imagery suburban (“..any block / any city..”) and trans-galactic (“..we float in trans-dimensional stardust… be with us..”) as he constructs and interprets the music’s aesthetic context, like some otherly-inspired spokesperson for Ra’s lost, interplanetary utopia, issuing urgent, radio telescope-intercepted broadcasts from the far side of Saturn.

It may take me a few dozen additional listens to really get to the bottom of this one, but for now, what else can I say, man. As far as visionary, retro-stylised afro-futurist star voyages are concerned, this is about as good as it gets in these dark days. Break free of those terrestrial shackles, as Locks’ broadcasts repeatedly demand, and prepare to get properly cosmic. 

 

Continuing on a thoroughly cosmic, trumpet-enhanced tip meanwhile, I’d nominate this magnum opus from Teeth of the Sea alumnus Sam Barton as an example of how to take the “lockdown album” concept and totally ace it.

When I initially tried to blather on about it a bit back in November, I’d not really had a chance to really take it all in, and as result essentially reviewed one song. Each time I’ve returned to it subsequently however, the whole thing just blows me away.

‘Sleuth’ of course remains a beatific aural cityscape of post-Bladerunner colossalism, but beyond that, almost every track here hits the same level of inspired grandeur in one way or another.

From the oneiric/overloaded arcade game reverie of the curiously named ‘Presbyterians!’ to the deconstructed, Solid Space-via-Arthur Russell bedroom dream-pop of ‘Nark’ to the haunting, electro-Miles melancholia of ‘We Painted Our Faces and Gave False Names’, this whole deal is, as its hard-fought occupation of the coveted # 4 slot suggests, an incredible piece of work. Really one of the best things I heard in 2020.

The seemingly unique feel of buried-vocal cuts like ‘Nark’ and ‘Mayfair in Exile’, oddly, also segues beautifully into our next world-beater - another solo UK home-recording project as it happens, also pulled together at the dawn of 2020’s lockdown, and perfectly placed to be enjoyed/appreciated during it. Yes, it’s…

 

 

Essentially a solo album from erstwhile Earthling Society leader Fred Laird (drummer Jon Blacow contributes solely via recontexualised rhythm tracks recycled from earlier recording sessions), ‘Soul Weaver’ is an accomplished suite of full strength Northern British psychedelia, largely - though not entirely - putting aside the rhythm-based “laid back psilocybic novelty travelogue” (his words, not mine) approach of Laird’s first album under this new band name, and instead digging deep into more introspective / melancholic psyche-rock territory, recalling 2014’s exceptional ‘England Have My Bones’.

Back in September, I tried to get an angle on it:

“More than usually concerned with capturing the atmos of Laird’s coastal North-West home, ‘Soul Weaver’ finds him dialling back considerably on Earthling Soc’s raw fuzz, instead constructing dense layers of ultra-reverbed guitar and noise textures, laid atop ramshackle homemade rhythm tracks, faux-exotic string ragas and semi-buried, sand and mist-choked melodies which seems to pull toward a kind of desolate, Romantic grandeur not a million miles away from Flying Saucer Attack’s noise-folk reveries, or even yr Van Der Graaf/mid-70s Floyd type stuff.

An ambitious and heartfelt album to say the least, this one’s going to to need a good few listens before I can really get my bearings on it, but one thing’s for sure – Laird has a gift for tapping into the beauty of this strange island’s psychedelic heritage that few other currently active musicians can match, and this record seems to take him deeper into the heart of things than he’s ever ventured before, so…. what can we do but take a deep breath of sea air and follow at a safe distance?”

A good few listens later, and what can I say? ‘Fishcat Mother’ still sounds like the ghost of some BJM-style retro-psych band being torn apart in a hurricane-blasted wind tunnel full of carnivorous reverb-beasts, ‘Catch a Falling Star’ blends deep space Popul Vuh/Ash Ra bliss-out with intangibly blasted acid-folk melancholia, eventually breaking out into a long-delayed suite of foot-on-monitor guitar heroics, whilst inexplicable folk-horror / ritual sacrifice interlude ‘Goatfoot on Owl Hill’ is genuinely rather disturbing, not least for its preponderance of duck calls.

But it is the nine minute ‘Tethered on the Wheel’ remains the album’s most extraordinary achievement - a vast sea-wall of massed, reverberating amp skree, primed to weather a storm from beyond the heavens, slowly accumulating around the core of a harrowing, disembodied acoustic lament, its pained, sand-blasted melody uncurling like the toes of some mind-borne devil. Arguably Laird’s best recorded work to date. 

 

 

Further testament to the supremacy of the live album.

Reproduced in full from June 2020:

“Well, here’s at least one more skull-fuckingly magnificent live rock album to keep us going, anyway. Recorded by the god-like Ethan Miller when former High Rise guitarist Munehiro Narita played a few dates in California in 2017, backed up by the rhythm section with whom he would subsequently form Psychedelic Speed Freaks, recording one of my favourite debut albums of recent years, this is as much of a roughshod, extremist rock apocalypse as fans of this incredible musician might rightfully expect.

Grinding through raw facsimiles of some old High Rise hits (‘Sadame’, ‘Outside Gentiles’, ‘Pop Sicle’) alongside a few marginally more restrained numbers from his subsequent band Green Flames [with whose work I confess I’m unfamiliar – need to get on that], this recording squashes most of the bassist and drummer’s spirited contributions into a blaring tar-pit thud, whilst Munehiro’s reedy vocals are pretty much an after-thought, just marking out time and space, against which the elastic lightning whip monolith of his infernally inspired guitar playing rages and howls centre stage, with the energy of a live audience and appropriately ripped amplification powering him forward toward some of the most exhilarating six string pyrotechnics I have ever heard - not just from him, but from anyone, ever.

I could, of course, continue spewing out this guff indefinitely, but instead let’s put it simply. If you are a fan of loud rock guitar-playing who values actual music over posing and gimmickry, you need Munehiro Narita’s recent and reissued recordings in your life. Failure to heed this advice will be liable to label you as kin to the kind of idiots who sold their copies of the Stooges records in 1971 because they were ‘a bit much’.” 

 

 

In a lot of ways, this seems like an odd choice for the #1 album of the year.

It is less bold, less ambitious, less sonically/emotionally overwhelming than a lot of the discs which have proceeded it on this list. Indeed, the music’s modesty of form, its unassuming / instantly accessible feel, is a bit part of its appeal. Essentially, it’s just a nice man, making some nice music, putting the best bits together on an album for us to enjoy.

As my listening habits and day-to-day engagement with music have changed over the past year or so however (see introductory spiel for the first instalment of this list, should you care to), this is an approach which has come to suit me very well. ‘Suite for Max Brown’ is almost certainly the newly released record I listened to the most during 2020 - which is usually a pretty good signifier of something or other. Every note of it, every quirk of the mix or musicianship, has become instantly familiar to me - which is likewise a pretty good feeling.

It’s an ‘ever-ready’ kind of spin, I suppose. Whatever mood prevails in my home-office space, whatever the degree of crap/chaos I have to contend with, whatever the weather’s like outside, I can always put on the Jeff Parker record and get something out of it.

Parker’s deftness of touch helps a great deal in this regard, of course. There’s a textural subtlety, a restrained kind of emotional resonance - a natural flow and an understanding of what ‘works’ - running through these tracks which feels like a culmination of decades of engagement with the core business of how to do music well, however casual he makes it appear.

From the thunderous, looped funk grooves of ‘Fusion Swirl’ and ‘Go Away’ to the weird fusion lullaby of ‘Del Rio’, the rain-on-the-windowpane introspection of ‘3 for L’ or the waves of ambient feedback and fixed tone drone which underpin many of these tracks, Parker’s work here is also consistently difficult to assign to any given genre. Excepting perhaps his more conventionally lyrical, clean-tone guitar explorations on ‘3 For L’ and the cover of John Coltrane’s ‘After the Rain’, you’d be hard-pressed to call much of the music here “jazz”, but then… you’d be hard-pressed to really call it anything else either, which is interesting.

In critical terms, sui generis type music is usually characterised as being daring, deliberate, attention-grabbing, experimental and so on. So what are we to make of genre-free music which is simply… comfortable? Again, just a nice (exceptionally talented) man, making some nice music, putting the best bits together on an album. This is how it came out. This is the stuff that sounded good. No point grappling around with terminology and hyperbole. Just dig it, or don’t. Your choice.

On a purely symbolic level meanwhile, ‘Suite for Max Brown’ also fits in very well as the “Best Record of 2020”. It won’t have escaped readers’ notice that last year saw me going absolutely ga-ga over the scene surrounding the International Anthem label. Five of their releases have graced this top forty list (which I think must be a record), and Jeff Parker played on four entries in the top twenty alone (likewise).

Will this infatuation last? Will the purple patch currently being enjoyed by these players and their support network manage to outlast our current historical ‘moment’? Probably not, but does it really matter? Whether confined to a few city blocks or (as in this case) expanding across the entire globe, music scenes have always lived and died like mayflies, but that doesn’t stop us consistently going back to the well, entire human lifetimes later - just so long as the water still tastes good.

As both an introduction to and summation of the nebulous positivity, accessibility and promise found within this particular stream of modern music, ‘Suite for Max Brown’ is just the ticket. Weighty aesthetic proclamations aside though, it’s perhaps more readily enjoyable as just some really swell music. It asks little, but gives much, and once welcomed into your home, it seems liable to stay around for the long haul, rarely gathering dust and making the ol’ day-to-day marginally better whenever it is reached for.

Labels: Asher Gamedze, best of 2020, Chicago Underground Quartet, Cornershop, Domo, Grey Hairs, Jeff Parker, Munehiro Narita, Rob Mazurek, Sam Barton, Taras Bulba

As you might well be aware, Bandcamp are doing another revenue-free Friday this week, so that seems as good a reason as any to round up another pile of great new(ish) sounds which have helped see me through the past month or so of brow-mopping, early summer heatwave home-working.

(Or alternatively, if you don’t mind waiting a bit and fancy helping out some of our fellow terrorist sympathisers, the site are donating their revenue from all sales on 19th June to the NAACP Legal Defence Fund.)

(And no, Bandcamp aren’t paying me (unfortunately), and I have no agenda to promote their site in-and-of-itself, but…. it’s currently the best place to listen to and obtain contemporary music in this cold, sad world, so makes sense to maximise the percentage of our pennies that go in good directions, no?)

Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Naujawanan Baidar.



Recorded via four track to “assorted dead stock cassette tapes” between 2016 and 2018, the material recently compiled on this double LP finds Tucson-based musician N.R. Safi combining traditional Afghan instrumentation with a bewildering array of loops, radio textures, distortion, digital effects, drums, Western/South Asian instruments and more besides, creating a dense and beguiling set of heavy psyche-blasted quasi-enthno semi-forgeries which basically sound 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. Righteous stuff indeed.


Emma-Jean Thackray.
Angel Bat Dawid.




In what now sounds like an evening of nigh-on unimaginable utopian bliss, one Thursday night late last year found my wife and I heading to Peckham, following up a cracking Italian meal by heading round the corner to drop in on what turned out to be the final hour of an evening of improvised music organised by the International Anthem label.

At the time, I was unable to establish the identity of the musicians we saw performing (no names were listed on the event’s advertising), but the group on stage as we entered was led by a woman conjuring careful, atmospheric textures from trumpet, keyboard, electronics and vocals, whilst another woman, initially seated, laid down wildly ecstatic, free-wheeling exclamations on clarinet, before rising to traverse the room in a state of reverie, powering the music forward in breathlessly thrilling fashion.

Backed up by an obligatory super-tight, laidback rhythm section (still unidentified at the time of writing), this performance was little short of mind-blowing - the kind of casually perfect summation of a particular strain of exultantly positive, welcoming culture which makes you feel humbled to have stumbled into its presence. Having spent almost every subsequent evening stuck in the goddamn flat at this point, I think back upon it often.

And now, many months of bandcamp-surfing later, I’m pretty sure I’ve established that we were listening that night to the sounds of Emma-Jean Thackray, whose new EP ‘Rain Dance’ came out in March, and to Angel Bat Dawid, who has an absolutely beautiful 7” out on the aforementioned International Anthem (see embedded links above).

Both of these short releases stand out as essential listening for anyone who’s been digging into this new stream of open-ended, jazz-affiliated greatness half as heavily as I have been in recent months, and, though the concept of Socially Distanced live music – or indeed any group playing whatsoever – still doggedly fails of compute in any way that makes sense to me, I continue to hope that somehow, someday I’ll be able to reconnect with these musicians and/or their contemporaries in a context that in some way rekindles the spirit of that glorious, random hour in Peckham, at some point before all is changed and gone.


Grey Hairs.



And speaking of memories of wild nights out meanwhile…. whilst I like Grey Hairs studio output just a little bit, the truth is that they’ve always really excelled as a live band. It therefore pretty much stands to reason that their new live LP – recorded last Halloween at exemplary Notts DIY venue J.T. Soar, and mixed and engineered brilliantly by in-house recording guy Phil Booth - is by default their best release to date.

If you like your rock served up with some crisp, hard-hitting Albini-isms, the quality of the sound here will likely floor you, it’s just a superb recording, and the band are on top form, the energy and good vibes palpable. I realise I’ve held forth repeatedly here in the past about the virtues of Grey Hairs’ approach to their craft, so what more is there to say? This is an excellent live album by an excellent live rock band, and how many more of those do you anticipate we’ll see coming down the pike over the next year or so?

Stand in the middle of your living room with a can of cheaper lager than you’d usually tolerate, turn off the lights, hang all your coats and stuff on a bunch of mannequins and chairs blocking your view of the hi-fi, and drink it all in.


Munehiro Narita.



Well, here’s at least one more skull-fuckingly magnificent live rock album to keep us going, anyway. Recorded by the god-like Ethan Miller (I mean, OF COURSE IT WAS) when former High Rise guitarist Munehiro Narita played a few dates in California in 2017, backed up by the rhythm section with whom he would subsequently form Psychedelic Speed Freaks, recording one of my favourite debut albums of recent years, this is as much of a roughshod, extremist rock apocalypse as fans of this incredible musician might rightfully expect.

Grinding through raw facsimiles of some old High Rise hits (‘Sadame’, ‘Outside Gentiles’, ‘Pop Sicle’) alongside a few marginally more restrained numbers from his subsequent band Green Flames [with whose work I confess I’m unfamiliar – need to get on that], this recording squashes most of the bassist and drummer’s spirited contributions into a blaring tar-pit thud, whilst Munehiro’s reedy vocals are pretty much an after-thought, just marking out time and space, against which the elastic lightning whip monolith of his infernally inspired guitar playing rages and howls centre stage, with the energy of a live audience and appropriately ripped amplification powering him forward toward some of the most jaw-droppingly exciting six string pyrotechnics I have ever heard - not just from him, but from anyone, ever.

I could, of course, continue spewing out this guff indefinitely, but instead let’s put it simply. If you are a fan of loud rock guitar playing who values actual music over posing and gimmickry, you need Munehiro Narita’s recent and reissued recordings in your life. Failure to heed this advice will be liable to label you as kin to the kind of idiots who sold their copies of the Stooges records in 1971 because they were ‘a bit much’.


Sarah Davachi / Ariel Kalma.



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.


Asher Gamedze.



Intense, heavily Coltrane-influenced spiritual jazz from this South African quintet, led by drummer Asher Gamedze. Only the opening 18 minute suite from a forthcoming double LP on the UK-based On The Corner label is currently available for listening, but that alone covers a lot of parched ground, mixing abrasive, ecstatic-yet-controlled blowouts from tenor player Buddy Wells (whose name sounds so much like he should be a famous 20th century jazz luminary, I had to invoke google to confirm that he isn’t) with finger-scrabbling group improv passages and deep, sinuous low end melodies, seemingly drawn from the same well of tribal/traditional influence that Louis Moholo-Moholo and his colleagues have been working with across the decades.

This is heady, no nonsense stuff, foregrounding PLAYIN’ over tonal/textural concerns or sonic surprises, and speaking wordlessly of connection to people and to landscape, and to political/metaphysical engagement and such. It should certainly appeal to listeners whose interest in the J word ceased abruptly on 17th July 1967, although some affecting, poetical contemplation from spoken wordist Nono Nkoane suggests other directions in which the full four sides of this as-yet-unheard set might be apt to travel.


Curanderos.



Seemingly demonstrating that you can take the boys out of the Pond, but can’t dry ‘em off no matter how hard you try, this collaboration between Bardo Pond guitarists the Gibbons Bros and a drummer named Scott Verrastro finds the trio initially tip-toeing around each other with a few minutes of uncertain, questioning abstraction, before they apparently make eye contact, exchange shrugs and lock into exactly the kind of stoned, heavy-weight-on-butterfly-wings grandeur which has helped cement the brothers’ main band’s ‘90s output as such an indelible and insurmountable cornerstone of modern heavy psyche.

Although the sound is necessary somewhat stripped back here, I’ve not heard these guys tap into this particular sweetest of sweet spots for some years now, making their decision to break out the big spoons and just dig in across the majority of this three track release feel like a slo-mo, fungoid sugar rush of purest satisfation. Taped in Bardo HQ in Philadelphia in 2018, this was released as a tape and name-yr-price download by the Athens, GA based Null Zone label a few months back, and I’m sure that all concerned would appreciate it if you were to name said price at something higher than zero (see intro above).


Eric Arn & Jasmine Pender.



Heavy duty, oxygen-sucking, cosmic / cloud level Popal Vuh-esque drone-work here from Austria-based American guitarist Eric Arn (Primordial Undermind) and British cellist Jasmine Pender (Rotten Bliss). First cut is perfect for witnessing a pale sun rise across a planetery curve as one falls into the orbit of a frozen, featureless gas giant, or so I should imagine, whilst the second explores more tense, noisy and recognisably instrument-y angles on the same kind of weightless inertia. It’s good, in other words.


Kamaal Williams.



And last but not least…. South London keyboard luminary Kamaal Williams aka Henry Wu has his follow up to 2018’s ‘The Return’ up for pre-order, the curiously named ‘Wu Hen’, with a few sample tracks suggesting a more expansive palette than the previous record’s straight trio line up (strings, sax, street chat), alongside some more abrasive, Gameboy-ish tones on ‘One More Time’, but still heavily swathed in darkly sinuous, disarmingly blissful yet inexplicably menacing nocturnal pavement atmos, straight from the heart of some mid-gentrification, pre-pandemic cultural sandpaper zone. Being cautious, I’ll wait until I can catch a stream of the whole thing in July (hopefully), but hey – keep a close eye on this cat, if you’re not already.

(About that title by the way – just like a lot of faux-mysterious hardcore bands, Williams’ Black Focus label seems to have a bit of a fetish for Japanese words and characters, so I’m guessing he’s going for ‘hen’ as in ‘strange/perverse’ here, rather than hen as in cluck-cluck.)

Labels: Angel Bat Dawid, Ariel Kalma, Asher Gamedze, Curanderos, Emma-Jean Thackray, Erc Arn, Grey Hairs, Jasmine Pender, Kamaal Williams, Munehiro Narita, Naujawanan Baidar, Sarah Davachi