FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
IN THIS PHOTO: Metronomy/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Essential September Releases
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THE next few months will be busy with...
artists releasing albums. That is axiomatic but, towards the end of the year, you always get some interesting stuff coming out! Maybe it is an effort to make the ‘best of the year’ lists; maybe autumn and winter are good months to release music. Whatever the reasons, do not assume we have seen the best of the year so far! There are some great records coming along before 2020 and, next month, we have some real treats in store. Lost Girls is the upcoming fifth studio album from Bat for Lashes. It is set to be released on 6th September through AWAL and follows her incredible 2016 album, The Bride. Like a lot of modern albums, we have already heard a few of the singles from Lost Girls. Kids in the Dark suggests a 1980s mood but, on Feel for You, The Hunger and Jasmine, there are other suggestions – the feeling is of the 1980s but there is a lot of variation in the music. This is an album you will want to order, and I am predicting it will be among the year’s finest albums. New York’s Frankie Cosmos release Close It Quietly on 6th September, so make sure you grab a copy. The music on offer is breezy and sunny but, as with all great albums, there is so much depth and variation.
This is how the record is described:
“Close It Quietly is a continual reframing of the known. It’s like giving yourself a haircut or rearranging your room. You know your hair. You know your room. Here’s the same hair, the same room, seen again as something new. Close It Quietly takes the trademark Frankie Cosmos micro-universe and upends it, spilling outwards into a swirl of referentiality that’s a marked departure from earlier releases, imagining and reimagining motifs and sounds throughout the album. The band’s fourth studio release is a manifestation of their collaborative spirit: Greta Kline and longtime bandmates Lauren Martin (synth), Luke Pyenson (drums), and Alex Bailey (bass) luxuriated in studio time with Gabe Wax, who engineered and co-produced the record with the band. Recording close to home— at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios— grounded the band, and their process was enriched by working closely with Wax, whose intuition and attention to detail made the familiar unfamiliar and allowed the band to reshape their own contexts”.
In terms of big releases, Iggy Pop’s Free is coming soon; it is going to be another accomplished and intriguing release from the master. It is Iggy Pop’s eighteenth solo studio album and the current single, James Bond, is as cool and quality-rich as anything he has released in the last few years. In fact, Sonali has also been released and it is another quality cut. It seems like Iggy Pop is in splendid form and I cannot wait to see what he offers on Free.
On 13th September (Sandy) Alex G’s House of Sugar arrives. If you have not heard tracks like Hope and Southern Sky then make sure you do. House of Sugar is, according to Domino, an album you will not want to miss. It is going to be fantastic:
“House of Sugar - (Sandy) Alex G’s ninth overall album and his third for Domino - is a highly meticulous, cohesive album: a statement of artistic purpose, showing off his ear for both persistent earworms and sonic adventurism”.
From its evocative cover to its string of popular singles, Charli XCX’s Charli is primed to be one of this year’s biggest releases. The album will be supported by a world tour, beginning in Atlanta on 20th September, 2019. Charli was preceded by the singles 1999 (with Troye Sivan), Blame It on Your Love (featuring Lizzo); Gone (with Christine and the Queens), Cross You Out (featuring Sky Ferreira) and Warm (featuring HAIM). Go and order a copy of the album and you can get one of the most anticipated Pop albums of 2019. I am not a big Charli XCX fan but some of her new singles are pretty good. I think she has developed a lot since 2013’s True Romance and it will be interesting to see how her new album is perceived.
A couple of albums you’ll want to investigate as Chelsea Wolfe’s Birth of Violence and Devendra Banhart’s Ma. Both are very different but you will want to snap them up (you can pre-order Wolfe’s album here. I have heard The Mother Road and American Darkness from Birth of Violence and they are fantastic tracks. This article explains more about the album and its themes:
“Years of incessant recording and touring led goth empress Chelsea Wolfe to this—the album she calls her "awakening."
"I think this record is its own journey," Wolfe says about her forthcoming release, Birth of Violence, "but it's also a reflection of my personal awakening and personal journey of opening up and breaking into a new era for myself as a human being and as an artist."
The circuitous path to Birth of Violence (out September 13) spun Wolfe around the globe touring in support of the six albums she's made since 2010. The exhaustive odyssey eventually demanded a palliative hiatus in the confines of her remote Northern California home, where she recorded her latest with collaborator Ben Chisholm and the sonic respiration of the surrounding wilderness.
Restoring herself at home, but still feverishly writing and recording with (as a famous friend called it) "Mercury in [her] hands," Wolfe's new offering is a spare, acoustic stream of meditations whose scrutiny contracts and expands from personal to global along the way”.
Go and get Ma, because Banhart is always interesting and, for his tenth album, it seems like we are going to get something special:
“Devendra Banhart's new album, Ma, is due September 13, 2019, on Nonesuch Records. This is Banhart's first album since 2016's Ape in Pink Marble. Ma, bursting with tender, autobiographical vignettes, displays a shift from the sonic experimentation of his previous albums to an intricate, captivating story-telling and emotional intimacy. Banhart favors organic sounds to accompany his voice and guitar, the arrangements bolstered by strings, woodwinds, brass, and keyboards.
The simply titled Ma is Devendra Banhart's third album for Nonesuch, one that addresses—often in a beguilingly oblique way—the unconditional nature of maternal love, the desire to nurture, the passing down of wisdom, the longing to establish the relationship of mother to child, and the consequences of that bond being broken. Banhart doesn't approach the album's maternal theme in a literal way; rather, by contemplating it, alluding to it, regarding the concept of motherhood from different angles, he has fashioned an album of multiple, intertwining narratives. Its concerns are both personal and global, with subtly autobiographical looks at life and death and ruminations about the precarious state of the world. The many lighthearted moments of Ma are balanced by deeply melancholic, even somber ones. Three tracks are in Spanish, the language that is as much Banhart's native tongue as English, and one in Portuguese”.
There are six more releases I would recommend. The first one is Jenny Hval’s The Practice of Love. Ashes to Ashes, from the album, is one of my favourite songs of the year and I urge people to pre-order the album. It is out on 13th September and this article explains more:
“Jenny Hval is back with a new album. The Practice Of Love was inspired by Valie Export’s 1985 film of the same name and sees the Norwegian artist exploring the concept of love as a poetic and artistic process.
“Love, and the practice of love, has been deeply tied to the feeling of otherness”, explains Hval. “In the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at the practice of otherness, this fragile performance, and how it can express love, intimacy, empathy and desire”.
One of the bubbliest and brightest releases of this year comes in the form of Metronomy’s Metronomy Forever. Salted Caramel Ice Cream is one of the most infectious singles of the year and there are going to be plenty of other treats on the album. This Pitchfork article sheds more light:
“Frontman Joseph Mount discussed the new album in a statement:
What happens is when you’re making music and you enter a world where you have achieved some sort of celebrity no matter how large or small you start to think about yourself in terms of legacy and what you're going to leave behind and then you realise that’s limited to the interest people have in you. In the end I feel completely comfortable with it. The less importance you place in any art the more interesting it can become in a way...I’m making music, I’m going to do some concerts, I need to feed my children”.
You can pre-order Metronomy Forever here; I would recommend grabbing it on vinyl. The British group are fantastic and Metronomy Forever follows from the exceptional Summer 08 of 2016.
IN THIS PHOTO: Brittany Howard/PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Horton/WireImage
For fans of Alabama Shakes and those who simply love great music, Brittany Howard’s Jaime is an album you will want to get. You can buy the album here - and her recent single, Get High, is simply magnificent. I will not include quotes/snippets about all the remaining albums but, here, we learn more about Jaime and its inspiration:
“Brittany gave Jaime the same name of her sister, who passed away when both were teenagers. “The title is in memoriam, and she definitely did shape me as a human being,” said Brittany Howard. “But, the record is not about her. It’s about me. I’m pretty candid about myself and who I am and what I believe. Which is why I needed to do it on my own.”
Brittany assembled a band that included Alabama Shakes bassist Zac Cockrell, jazz keyboardist Robert Glasper and Grammy-nominated drummer Nate Smith to work on material she brought into engineer Shawn Everett’s Los Angeles studio. She came out with an 11-track effort, the first under her own name. The inspiration came from a reflective drive from Nashville to California. “I turned 30 and I was like, ‘What do I want the rest of my life to look like?'” Howard added. “Do I want to play the same songs until I’m 50 and then retire, or do I do something that’s scarier for me? Do I want people to understand me and know me, do I want to tell them my story? I’m very private, but my favorite work is when people are being honest and really doing themselves”.
The remaining three albums you need this year come later in the month. Liam Gallagher’s much-anticipated Why Me? Why Not is out on 20th September and is a record you will want to get involved with. I bought his debut album, As You Were, back in 2017 and it was a mixed experience. I liked some of the songs but felt there was something lacking; a need for more swagger and bigger tunes. On the one hand, he was as direct and up for it as usual, but I felt there was something missing from the blend. From what I have heard of Why Me? Why Not, it looks like it will be a stronger effort. Nobody is expecting Gallagher to replicate his work with Oasis, but I feel his sophomore album is going to be a more rounded, solid and memorable affair. I will keep my eyes out for that but, also, Girl Band are releasing The Talkies on 27th September. If you have not read the interview they gave with Loud and Quiet recently then check it out. The band have had a bit of a tough past few years but it seems, on their new album, they have channeled all of this – and a lot more – into the best music of their careers. You can pre-order the album, but the band are definitely ready and keen for people to hear:
“‘The Talkies’ is Girl Band’s follow-up album to their ground breaking 2015 debut ‘Holding Hands with Jamie’. It was recorded in November 2018 at Ballintubbert House, Ireland, “a few pay grades above what we're used to!”, the alien construction of Ballintubbert and its corridors help to navigate Girl Band’s cataclysmic sound within a world of its own.
“In many ways the idea behind the album was to make an audio representation of the house.“ And this enigmatic manor becomes Girl Band’s sonic playground. The Talkies is living, breathing, in a continual state of metamorphosis. It encompasses everything there is to love about Girl Band while simultaneously causing an exciting level of discomfort. The moaning and sawing guitars, atonal blankets of sound, abstractive lyrical repetition, chugging snare and ascending/descending snakes and ladders noise-rock guitar deliver something that is so distinctively Girl Band”.
Tegan and Sara’s, Hey, I'm Just Like You is also out on 27th September, and it is surely going to be another album that troubles those year-end lists. This year has been dominated by women, and with new albums from the likes of Lana Del Rey and Sleater-Kinney, Tegan and Sara are adding to the rich and growing group. Check out the duo’s official website for details but, as they say, it has been a particularly interesting creative/recording process:
“Last year while writing our new memoir, we came across two cassette tapes with dozens of songs we wrote in high school. Defiant and melodramatic, the songs captured the exultation and grief of first loves, first losses, ecstatic kiss-offs, and psychedelic tributes to the friendships we had as teenagers. It had been over twenty years since we had heard the songs and quite honestly, we both expected to listen once, cringe, and bury them for another couple decades. But they were good. Like, really good.
They were raw, and in some cases the lyrics were hard to decipher. But the melodies, the honesty in the words, and the joy listening to them after all these years was undeniable. We decided immediately that those songs were the demos we’d use to build the new Tegan and Sara record. Hey, I’m Just Like You has twelve songs, but in making those twelve songs we pulled sections from nearly twenty of those lost high school demos.
We kept the original lyrics where we could, and we only wrote four new sections. In some cases, Sara sings songs I wrote, and in other cases I sing songs she wrote. For the first time ever, we share vocal duties on a handful of songs making them the first truly “Tegan AND Sara” songs. Alex Hope produced the record in Vancouver, where we recorded this past April and May. It is also the FIRST Tegan and Sara album produced, performed, engineered, mixed, and mastered by a team of all women”.
The fact that Hey, I'm Just Like You was made by women makes it pretty special. This is their ninth studio album and twenty years after their debut, Under Feet Like Ours, they continue to progress and delight. I love their music and feel Hey, I'm Just Like You will stack up again the year’s best – quite a way to end next month. I have selected a pile of the albums out next month and, whilst each individual cannot buy all of them, stream them if you can. It is a busy and eclectic month that promises some pretty epic music. I am excited to hear these great albums out, that is for sure! Check out my recommendations and, if you have some spare pennies, go and buy a couple of your favourites. Whilst this year has been sensational for music, the upcoming releases for September proves that there is plenty more…
GOLD to come!