FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
IN THIS PHOTO: Lana De Rey
Essential October Releases
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WITH there being some seriously good albums…
due next month, I am going to suggest the best that you will want to own. If you have some pennies set aside for records, I feel the suggestions below are for you. This year has seen so many terrific albums released. I think one or two due next month could rank alongside the very best of 2021. The first week is actually 1st October. There are a few big albums out that you will want to own. Brandi Carlile’s In These Silent Days is out on 1st October. It is an album that you need to pre-order. In this article from SPIN, we discover more about a much-anticipated album from the Washington-born songwriter:
“Carlile crafted the 10 songs that comprise In These Silent Days with longtime co-conspirators Tim and Phil Hanseroth. The songs were written while Carlile was quarantined at home and chronicle acceptance, faith, loss and love.
Here’s what she had to say about the record:
Never before have the twins and I written an album during a time of such uncertainty and quiet solitude. I never imagined that I’d feel so exposed and weird as an artist without the armor of a costume, the thrill of an applause and the platform of the sacred stage.
Despite all this, the songs flowed through—pure and unperformed, loud and proud, joyful and mournful. Written in my barn during a time of deep and personal reckoning.
There’s plenty reflection…but mostly it’s a celebration.
This album is what drama mixed with joy sounds like. It’s resistance and gratitude, righteous anger and radical forgiveness.
It’s the sound of these silent days”.
Another album that is due on 1st October is Lady Gaga & Tony Bennett’s Love for Sale. Even if you are not a big fan of either artist, it is going to be such a beautiful album – you will want to grab a copy. Go and pre-order Love for Sale (“The follow up to 2014's Grammy Award-winning Cheek To Cheek, Bennett and Gaga's latest collaborative album is a celebration of the Cole Porter songbook and a testament to the pair's enduring friendship and love for one another”). Recently, Bennett and Lady Gaga performed together at Radio City Music Hall. This is what Vulture observed:
“Though unused for the past 18 months, Radio City Music Hall’s 6,105 red velvet chairs will likely need a tune-up by the end of this week thanks to Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga, and the 27 standing ovations the pair received during their miraculous, magnificent concert there on Thursday night (August 5).
It was the second and final performance of “One Last Time: An Evening With Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga,” and the sold-out audience had come to pay their respects — and in their sequined, bedazzled best. Many dressed for the occasion in ball gowns, tuxedos, and gemstone-drenched smoking jackets; masks were sparse (though attendees were required to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test to enter the venue), but there were even a few rhinestone-studded face coverings spotted in Radio City’s teeming lobby beforehand.
When Gaga made her entrance just after 9 p.m., in a sparkling white ball gown, and struck a pose, the crowd — which included Hillary and Bill Clinton, who received a shout-out from the mistress of ceremonies — leapt to their feet and cheered. When the curtain rose an hour later to reveal Bennett for the first time, standing by the piano with his arms outstretched in elated greeting, they stood — clapping and waving, this time as if facing an old friend for the first time in years — until he picked up his microphone and began to sing. The vast majority of those present for Bennett’s final performance at Radio City Music Hall understood the assignment: We were here to watch a beloved New York icon say good-bye to the stage, with his decorated protégé giving him a proper send-off”.
I really love the collaborative work between Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. They are such a perfect fit and, although Bennett is ninety-five, I hope that the two work together on a further album. I am definitely going to check out Love for Sale. I am excited to see what the album offers and what the highlights will be. Definitely, one of the biggest albums due next month!
Staying with 1st October, and the final album that I will recommend from this week is Tirzah’s Colourgrade. This is an album that every music fan should order. Rough Trade provide us some more details about an L.P. that is going to get a lot of love and focus. Tirzah is such a wonderful artist making music that is so resonant and instant:
“Colourgrade follows on from 2018’s immediate cult classic LP, Devotion. It forms a subconscious snapshot from across a year when Tirzah was playing live regularly for the first time, in the depths of promoting Devotion and recorded soon after the birth of her first child and shortly before her second child was born. The album explores recovery, gratitude and new beginnings, presenting a singer having discovered the type of love that is shared between a mother and a child for the first time, whilst simultaneously working as an artist. Capturing both the great and the scary, the exhaustion and the recovery, Colourgrade is a listless amble through the innermost feelings, an intoxicating presentation of a full time mother and artist. As always, a Tirzah record is a family affair. That doesn’t just mean grandmum and granddad, but the extended CURL crew that includes long term collaborators, Mica Levi and Coby Sey, the younger brother of producer Kwes who mixes on Colourgrade. It’s this natural, collaborative energy that keeps Tirzah’s music fresh and progressive”.
As the rest of October is busy, I will move things to 8th. There is one album from this week that I want to source. It is Pip Blom’s Welcome Break. This is an album that I am really excited to hear. Do go and pre-order and album that is going to be among this year’s very finest:
“Actively seeking out moments of creative-authenticity, be it via a slightly- out-of-tune guitar or proudly-fuzzed vocals, Pip Blom take us back full circle and introduce us to their Welcome Break- an eleven-track release which resonates with about as much decisive allure as it’s Boat precursor, but this time with a bit more contemporary chaos to boot. Where Boat reckoned as a fresh-faced, yet gloriously fearless game- changer, Welcome Break is the self-assured older sibling who, with an additional year or two behind themselves, isn’t afraid to speak out, take lead, and instigate a liberated revolution-come-bliss-out.
Following an extensive touring schedule which saw the Dutch 4-piece roam over field, oceans, and Glastonbury’s John Peel stage following the release of their debut record Boat, any such cool-cat would be forgiven for wanting to kick back, and indulge in some very appreciated, time off. As is often the way, such timely-abandon cannot be said for Pip Blom however, who immediately began to gather up all her soaked-up inspirations taken from the road, and manifest a re-energised sense of self, and ritualistic songwriting. It’s at this stage in our indie-fairy-tale that things start to get ever so 2020. Whilst the world was suddenly put on hold as a result of Covid-19, Pip Blom, who’d made plans to return to their favourite ‘Big Jelly Studios’ in Ramsgate, England, were suddenly faced with a very sticky, kind of dilemma. “We’d scheduled to go into the studio in September but summer started moving and there were a couple of countries not allowed to go to the UK anymore... a week before we had to go, the Netherlands was one of those countries”- notes Pip.
In total, three weeks were spent recording what would become the groups sophomore release; a Al Harle engineered love-affair which was self- produced entirely by the band and culminated in a legally intimate, fully- seated album play-back, to six, of Ramsgate’s most chorus-savvy and ‘in- the-know’ residents. Getting out of their hometown and into an environment which removed all notions of “normality” or personal space, was an atmospheric godsend in terms of motivation; an act which encouraged Pip Blom to re-adjust and buckle down as a unit again, after spending so long in mandatory isolation”.
The following week, 15th is a pretty packed one! I shall narrow it down to three albums from that week (as there are a few from 22nd and 29th that are also worth getting). The first I am going to suggest is Hayden Thorpe’s Moondust For My Diamond. The former Wild Beasts lead is one of my favourite artists. His second solo album is shaping up to be very special indeed. I would recommend that everyone set aside some money so that they can pre-order the album:
“In contrast to Diviner, a record that very much favoured the inner world, Moondust For My Diamound sees Hayden Thorpe moving into a more natural visual and sonic palette, gazing outward on the world. Produced by Richard Formby and Nathan Jenkins (Bullion), Thorpe has made an album that is galvanising, reassuring, elegant, seductive: it oozes Big Cosmic Energy”.
Make sure that you invest in Thorpe’s upcoming album. He is someone that always provides such incredible music. I am going to move on and concentrate on 22nd in a minute. There are a couple of other albums due out on 15th October that I think are going to be worth checking out – October is an especially busy month, as it has five Fridays!
Johnny Marr’s Fever Dreams, Pt. 1 is another great album that you will want to go and get. The former legendary guitarist with The Smiths, Marr has proved himself to be one of the most consistently brilliant and astonishing artists. I love his solo work, so I am really keen to see what we get from Fever Dreams Pt. 1. It is going to be another wonderful and memorable album from the incredible Marr. It is an album that I can definitely recommend people go and get. Pre-order your copy to ensure that you do not miss out on one of the biggest releases from next month:
“Informed by the kind of powerful, anthemic and direct approach to words instantly present in Spirit, Power And Soul, the songs on the ‘Fever Dreams Pt 1’ EP arrive with an emotional potency. Fusing the language of soul music with his roots as a “Mancunian glam rocker”, lyrics that could be simultaneously personal, universal, and subtly political, with a fantastically expansive sound. The new EP reflects Johnny’s multifaceted past, but takes his music somewhere startlingly new”.
Although there are a lot of other great albums out on 15th October, I am going to keep it quite simple and finish with another that I feel everyone should set aside some money for. Remi Wolf is a brilliant new artist everyone should know and investigate. Juno is an album I am excited about. I am not sure whether there is a vinyl release, but one can pre-order it on C.D. now. If you need a bit more insight into Juno, NME provided some news and further exploration recently:
“Remi Wolf is preparing to release Juno on 15th October. This is a new artist that is primed to become a huge success. I am going to follow her career to see where she heads. Wolf is someone that everyone needs to spend some time with.
“In a press release, Wolf described ‘Quiet On Set’ as “full on psycho”, saying that “as much as the song is silly and fun, it really does reflect my life and feelings at the time… overworked, manic, reckless, and childish”.
She noted that ‘Grumpy Old Man’ came from a more vulnerable place than she usually taps into with her songwriting, with the number inspired by “some of the most benign things [that] can make me irritated and defensive, which makes me feel old, fragile, and careless”.
Both tracks will appear on ‘Juno’, set for release on October 15 via Island. The LP will also feature last month’s single ‘Liquor Store’, and is named after her dog, which she adopted during lockdown.
“Creating my debut album ‘Juno’ was like a fever dream,” Wolf said. “So many changes were happening in my life while I was creating these songs and I think my album really reflects the feelings of tension and release that these changes provoked in me.
“Every song on this record is a vivid snapshot into what was going on in my life and mindset the day I wrote each one. I hope my Remjobs can hear my honesty and passion come through and, if not, I just hope they think each song is a banger!”
‘Juno’ comes as the follow-up to Wolf’s 2020 EP, ‘I’m Allergic To Dogs!’. NME declared the record one of the best releases of the year, with writer Charlotte Krol calling it “a flamboyant collage of pop that sticks together vignettes of her love life, hedonism and humdrum hindrances”.
There are a few albums out on 29th October I am keen to point people in the direction of. Before that, 22nd October is promising a lot of gold! I am going to narrow it down to five from that week. That might not sound like narrowing; there are a lot of great albums out that week! The first on the radar is Duran Duran’s FUTURE PAST. Go and pre-order your copy as I think the legendary band are producing some of their best music in years. The band spoke with The Guardian earlier in the year about FUTURE PAST:
“The band are all far-flung now, with families, side projects, lives that span from Los Angeles to Chelsea. But they refer to an almost gravitational force that Simon Le Bon, sitting next to John Taylor in hoodie and blue jeans, says he felt right from his very first audition. The band started playing the track Sound of Thunder, and he stood up and invented a verse on the spot. “I thought: ‘God, this is the real thing, this is how it’s supposed to be,’” he remembers. “And I knew that I had to hold on to it as a job, and I had to hold on to those melodies, and I had to hold on to these guys because I knew there would never be anything in my life that was more creative and more immediate and more absolute than being in Duran Duran.”
“There was a certain inevitability about the new album,” John Taylor continues. “We get to the end of a touring cycle and we know we need time away from each other – but it’s like a chemical thing, it’s a pull that happens, almost like a mission; we have to go back!”
“I wasn’t into making a new album at all,” counters Le Bon. “I was like: ‘Let’s just do a single’, because I thought nobody’s going to listen to a whole album, people just listen to singles now. But I think I was on my own in that camp and it was a band decision. That’s how we work: four people and no leader.”
Arriving at the studio, “we show up with no ideas whatsoever and run up at it like a lump of clay in the middle of the room”, says John Taylor. Invisible began with a Le Bon lyric, “a personal thing about a relationship where one person is not listening, and the other person starts to think: maybe I’m just not here”. Soon it grew into something broader, “about being human, and realising there’s a lot of us and we don’t all get heard”. It is a year since it was recorded, but Taylor notes that in that time, as the world has weathered isolation, upheaval and political protest, the song has acquired new layers of meaning. “It’s become enormously resonant,” he says. “And I’m glad that we are not coming back with a party song. That would feel tone deaf”.
Moving on to Elton John’s The Lockdown Sessions. Make sure you pre-order. As the title suggests, it is the icon recording songs with a range of artists through lockdown. Here are some more details:
“Elton John releases a collaborations album The Lockdown Sessions. The singer's 32nd studio LP features tracks with Miley Cyrus, Lil Nas X, Gorillaz, Young Thug, Dua Lipa, Andrew Watt, Stevie Wonder and more.
1. Elton John and Dua Lipa – Cold Heart (PNAU Remix)
2. Elton John, Young Thug and Nicki Minaj – Always Love You
3. Surfaces feat. Elton John – Learn To Fly
4. Elton John and Charlie Puth – After All
5. Rina Sawayama and Elton John – Chosen Family
6. Gorillaz feat. Elton John and 6LACK – The Pink Phantom
7. Elton John and Years and Years – It's a sin (global reach mix)
8. Miley Cyrus feat. WATT, Elton John, Yo-Yo Ma, Robert Trujillo and Chad Smith – Nothing Else Matters
9. Elton John and SG Lewis – Orbit
10. Elton John and Brandi Carlile – Simple Things
11. Jimmie Allen and Elton John – Beauty In The Bones
12. Lil Nas X feat. Elton John – One Of Me
13. Elton John and Eddie Vedder – E-Ticket
14. Elton John and Stevie Wonder – Finish Line
15. Elton John and Stevie Nicks – Stolen Car
16. Glen Campbell and Elton John – I’m Not Gonna Miss You”.
Lana Del Rey’s Blue Banisters is another huge album next month that you will want to own. Go and pre-order another treasure from a modern great. So soon after Chemtrails Over the Country Club, it is great to have more music from her. This Pitchfork article provides more details:
“Lana Del Rey has detailed her next studio album Blue Banisters, which finally arrives October 22. She has also shared the LP’s latest single. This one’s titled “Arcadia,” and Del Rey wrote and produced it with Drew Erickson. Watch Del Rey’s self-directed “Arcadia” video below.
“Arcadia” follows three other singles the singer-songwriter released together in May: “Blue Banisters,” “Wildflower Wildfire,” and “Text Book.” All three songs, as well as “Arcadia,” are featured on Blue Banisters. Find the album’s tracklist and artwork below.
Lana Del Rey announced Blue Banisters in late April and originally suggested it would come out July 4. She had also teased something called Rock Candy Sweet, but no other details followed.
Between 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! and the more recent Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Lana Del Rey published Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, her first collection of poetry, along with an audiobook counterpart she produced with Antonoff.
01 Textbook
02 Blue Banisters
03 Arcadia
04 Interlude - The Trio
05 Black Bathing Suit
06 If You Lie Down With Me
07 Beautiful
08 Violets for Roses
09 Dealer
10 Thunder
11 Wildflower Wildfire
12 Nectar of the Gods
13 Living Legend
14 Cherry Blossom
15 Sweet Carolina”.
Parquet Courts’ Sympathy for Life is a great album you will want to own. This is the seventh album from the New York band. They always deliver such exceptional music. It will be intriguing to discover what Sympathy for Life contains:
“Parquet Courts’ thought-provoking rock is dancing to a new tune. Sympathy For Life finds the Brooklyn band at both their most instinctive and electronic, spinning their bewitching, psychedelic storytelling into fresh territory, yet maintaining their unique identity.
Built largely from improvised jams, inspired by New York clubs, Primal Scream and Pink Floyd and produced in league with Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Hot Chip, David Byrne), Sympathy For Life was always destined to be dancey. Unlike its globally adored predecessor, 2018’s Wide Awake! the focus fell on grooves rather than rhythm.
“Wide Awake! was a record you could put on at a party,” says co-frontman Austin Brown. “Sympathy For Life is influenced by the party itself. Historically, some amazing rock records been made from mingling in dance music culture – from Talking Heads to Screamadelica. Our goal was to bring that into our own music”.
The final album from 22nd October that you will want to own is Self Esteem’s Prioritise Pleasure. This is an album that many people are looking forward to. The work of Rebecca Lucy Taylor, she is going to scoop huge reviews for Prioritise Pleasure. Go and pre-order it:
“The follow up to Self Esteem’s acclaimed 2019 debut album Compliments Please, Prioritise Pleasure is a record that reminds us all of the importance of being our unapologetic selves, putting your insecurities out there in the hope that it can be the first step towards healing them. Honest disclosure has always been Self Esteem’s forte, and so each track on Prioritise Pleasure handles difficult themes with nuanced perspective, comforted and counter-balanced with an array of rhythmic flourishes that speak to the eclecticism of her experience and influence.
Having allowed itself grace, Prioritise Pleasure is also a record of great joy. Working again with trusted producer Johan Karlberg [of afro-fusion trio The Very Best], it was stitched together throughout the pandemic in chunked sessions, the time between each batch encouraging Taylor to fully flesh out her ideas. With Prioritise Pleasure, Self Esteem comes one step closer to reminding listeners – and herself – that true success begins and ends with self-acceptance, telling your story in the way that only you can”.
There are four albums from 29th October that you will want to seek out and spend some time with. Lotic’s Water is the first one I would advise people to pre-order. It is shaping up to be a fantastic album you will not want to miss out on:
“J’Kerian Morgan, the artist known as Lotic releases her new album Water. Water, for Houndstooth, is a stunning revelation; a tender meditation on love’s losses and lifeforce, timelines, bloodlines and resilience. Arriving at the end of a period Morgan recalls as, “having to be adaptable, while being dragged through the trenches,” Water adds the haunting quality of siren song to a career already marked by its engaging emotionality.
To arrive at Water meant to become like water. Lotic dedicated two years to a deep, intentional process of surrendering to softness, welcoming impermanence, embracing intimate relationships with her environment and self. Yet, to embrace vulnerability is to welcome its totality.
Water is the complete embodiment of Lotic’s dedicated praxis; one which unpicks a certain narrative about corrosive angst and outlier musicality. Compositions curve around the sub bass of an 808, with vibrations and hums superseding clarity and separation. Drums are softened to a powdery warmth, and each chapter unfolds as a symphonic sound poem. Heartful depictions of love relationships to others and the self, to ancestry and identity, are marked by stunning new expressions of ecstatic voices.
Water heals, and it harms. It can sharpen, scald or silently consume. Water is a conduit for human corruption, such as the wrenching cruelty of forced Middle Passage crossings, yet water remains a site of ritual and absolution, a source of constant renewal”.
Marissa Nadler’s The Path of the Clouds is one I am excited about. Many people might not know about her music. This is a stunning forthcoming album that I would encourage people to pre-order:
“The Path of the Clouds, Marissa Nadler’s ninth solo album, is the most stylistically adventurous, lyrically transfixing, and melodically sophisticated collection of songs in her already rich discography. Gripped by wanderlust while suddenly housebound at the start of the pandemic in 2020, Nadler escaped into writing, and came back with a stunning set of songs about metamorphosis, love, mysticism, and murder. Blurring the line between reality and fantasy and moving freely between past and present, these 11 deeply personal, self-produced songs find Nadler exploring new landscapes, both sonic and emotional.
Nadler tracked the skeletons of the songs at home and then sent them to some choice collaborators, including experimental harpist Mary Lattimore and Simon Raymonde, the Cocteau Twins bassist and her Lost Horizons collaborator. Multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess, having recently worked on the soundtrack to the film Mandy, adds intricate melodic power throughout the album. Jesse Chandler, Nadler’s piano teacher (as well as a member of Mercury Rev and Midlake), plays winding woodwinds and plaintive piano to luminous effect. Fellow singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle contributes a slinky guitar solo on “Turned Into Air,” while Black Mountain’s Amber Webber steps in as a vocal foil to Nadler, a ghostly apparition in the distance of “Elegy.”
The Path of the Clouds showcases the power of an artist at the peak of her powers nearly 20 years into an acclaimed career as a songwriter and singer. Coming a long way from the spare dream folk of her earlier work, she has remained inspired and continues to evolve, open to new ideas and directions. The proof is right here, in Nadler’s most ambitious and complex album yet”.
The War on Drugs’ I Don’t Live Here Anymore is an album that, again, I am looking ahead to. The first album in four years, you will want to pre-order it:
“The War On Drugs first studio album in four years, I Don’t Live Here Anymore. Over the last 15 years, The War on Drugs have steadily emerged as one of this century’s great rock and roll synthesists, removing the gaps between the underground and the mainstream, between the obtuse and the anthemic, making records that wrestle a fractured past into a unified and engrossing present. The War On Drugs have never done that as well as they do with their fifth studio album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, an uncommon rock album about one of our most common but daunting processes—resilience in the face of despair.
Just a month after The War On Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding received the 2018 Grammy for Best Rock Album, the core of Granduciel, bassist Dave Hartley, and multi-instrumentalist Anthony LaMarca retreated to upstate New York to jam and cut new demos, working outside of the predetermined roles each member plays in the live setting. These sessions proved highly productive, turning out early versions of some of the most immediate songs on I Don’t Live Here Anymore. It was the start of a dozen-plus session odyssey that spanned three years and seven studios, including some of rock’s greatest sonic workshops like Electric Lady in New York and Los Angeles’ Sound City. Band leader Adam Granduciel and trusted co-producer/engineer Shawn Everett spent untold hours peeling back every piece of these songs and rebuilding them.
One of the most memorable sessions occurred in May 2019 at Electro-Vox, in which the band’s entire line-up — rounded out by keyboardist Robbie Bennett, drummer Charlie Hall, and saxophonist Jon Natchez — convened to record the affecting album opener “Living Proof.” Typically, Granduciel assembles The War On Drugs records from reams of overdubs, like a kind of rock ‘n’ roll jigsaw puzzle. But for “Living Proof,” the track came together in real time, as the musicians drew on their chemistry as a live unit to summon some extemporaneous magic. The immediacy of the performance was appropriate for one of the most personal songs Granduciel has ever written.
The War On Drugs’ particular combination of intricacy and imagination animates the 10 songs of I Don’t Live Here Anymore, buttressing the feelings of Granduciel’s personal odyssey. It’s an expression of rock ’n’ roll’s power to translate our own experience into songs we can share and words that direct our gaze toward the possibility of what is to come”.
I am actually going to wrap it up there I think, as I have recommended quite a few albums and I am aware that most people will not have the budget for all of them! There are some options for the record buyer if they are looking for guides and tips for next month’s best. If you needed an insight into which October albums you should own, I hope that the above…
IN THIS PHOTO: Self Esteem
IS of assistance.