Squid—Bright Green Field

It never went away—but some would have you believe the UK is in the throes of a(nother) post-punk revival. After glutting on glorified Joy Division impersonators Protomartyr, Preoccupations and Interpol, we’ve decided to show those Yankee doodle twats how it’s done by spending half a decade creating our own insipid tribute acts to The Fall.

It’s hard to resist post-punk buzz-band fatigue. Is the industry trying to frack primordial punk ooze from some deep and forgotten cultural fissure, every few months picking a name from their raffle to herald as the New Saviours of this tired and ancient genre? Maybe it just feels that way. I put off listening to Squid for a little while because I’d been overcome by the terrifying thought they’d be as shit as all their peers. Thankfully they’re actually alright.

Bright Green Field is lighter and more psychedelic than most modern post-punk. Rather than swaggering around holding its dick in both hands like a pump-action shotgun, this album revels in eccentricity, gentle humour, and not-too-out-there experimentation. Squid channel the likes of XTC and Talking Heads, with a joyful and associative approach to songwriting. In a musical landscape dominated by depressive diet-Deathconsciousnesses and posturing pricks, the easiness and confident simplicity of Bright Green Field is properly refreshing. It’s like finally being allowed a Sprite after being forced to drink nothing but Coke for months.

The best representation of this is in the album’s (very strong) vocals. There’s no affectation of an Estuary accent to bait the 6 Music crowd. It actually feels as though Squid are trying to make good music, instead of just engaging in some kind of elaborate prank that only people within a five-mile radius of central London would understand.

Squid are unpretentious and self-aware enough to limit their goals. They aren’t trying to invert the world’s power structures using big riffs and cool shirts— nor do they waste your time screaming Hackneyed (har har) platitudes—but they still have enough bite to justify the inclusion of lyrics in their music. Their music feels spontaneous and eccentric—but respects listeners too much to blow smoke up its own bum. Definitely worth a go.

Bright Green Field is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!—Godspeed You! Black Emperor

The latest Godspeed LP feels significant for several reasons. With its release, the band’s post-revival albums now outnumber their original run of three, solidifying this second phase of their discography as un-ignorable. The album also marks Godspeed’s return to shortwave radio samples and field recordings—largely absent from their music since 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists…. Most importantly, it’s been heralded as a return to the impossibly high form of their early work.

That last point is both dubious and subjective—and I’d contest that the maligned “Luciferian Towers” and Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress are far from the duds naysayers would have you believe. Asunder… is especially overlooked, replicating the fury of Godspeed’s live sets in a way that no other studio effort has quite managed.

What G_d’s Pee does do is interrupt the one-upmanship (and one-notemanship) of their discography. Revival albums have been incrementally louder and more bombastic—at the expense of nuance, variety, and that tremulous half-hope that suffuses the old stuff. Many listeners like a band’s discography to feel in conversation with itself; elaborating, contradicting and offering something fresh with every release. It’s no wonder the fatigue had set in for those guys.

G_d’s Pee touches on new territories and unexplored moods. It’s the first LP they’ve released that feels properly post-Bush (don’t ask me how—it just does). Considering Dubya stepped down in 2009, that’s a long sulk to come out of. The album responds to contemporary concerns, feeling right at home in a world where the response we must offer to global health emergencies is to sit around in our pants for a year. Committed to “waiting for the end”, as Godspeed put it, we can only look with bemused distance and seek a unifying light in the darkening hours of our species.  

The band still don’t arrange pieces with the intricacy they used to—but their grander and more direct recent style rouses without being hokey. You may have long dismissed Godspeed as ‘crescendo-core’—but that reductive take is informed by twenty years of shite imitators. This band remain among the best in their field and, twenty-five years down the line, are yet to significantly compromise.

G_d’s Pee is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Flock of Dimes—Head of Roses

Head of Roses is a heartfelt and springly sophomore from Flock of Dimes (Jenn Wesner). Wesner is best-known as a member of Wye Oak but with this, and 2016’s If You See Me, Say Yes, she has carved a definitive, confident line as a solo artist.

What impresses immediately is Head of Roses’ broad soundscape. Every track on the LP does something to be sonically distinct—but none is an outlier or ugly duckling. “Price of Blue” and “No Question” are striking both in their differences and similarities. The former is a full-on Cocteau Twins-style ballad, lifted by exultant and airy strings; the latter is muggy, stripped-back and intimate, grounded by powerful brass. Their commonality is Wesner’s unique artistic sensibility, a quality as hard to describe as it is easy to recognise.

It’s lazy and flippant to compare acts like Flock of Dimes to Kate Bush. Bush, in opening the door for female-fronted pop to revel in its own weirdness and creative bravery, inadvertently became the yardstick by which all future attempts at such auteurship would be measured. But there are undeniably shadows of her style on Head of Roses. Most of these shadows are revealed by Wesner’s luminous vocals; in her voice-as-instrument approach, and the ease with which she leaps huge intervals between notes. The weightless, unpredictable journeys of these vocal lines keep you in a constant state of expectation and vulnerability; stumbling blindly into every next moment.

Head of Roses feels like it is unravelling or writing itself as every moment of listening unfolds. It holds the same tension as when a band improvises. The idea that everything will suddenly fall apart is suspended like a ten-ton block above the stage. And the more precarious, the more on-the-brink a band can make everything feel, the more electrifying their improvisation will feel. Head of Roses dutifully delivers that same spontaneous energy to a world that’s starving for it, and is as close to a live experience many will have felt in a long time.   

Head of Roses is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Benjamin Finger—Auditory Colors

Benjamin Finger’s Auditory Colors is a synaesthetic treat whose intricate texture rewards attentive listening. Ostensibly an ambient album, Auditory Colors is actually bursting with melody at every level of its rich and varied instrumentation. And whilst publishing as a solo project—composing and recording every track here—Finger has called on a number of collaborators who each enrich the album in their own unique ways.

The first thing you’ll notice is the LP’s imaginative use of loops and field recordings. Abstracted through post-processing and manipulation, these fragments of word salad and sonic texturing become melodic as they repeat and, in some cases, appear to provide the framework of entire songs. They give the album an enormous sense of character and intimacy—a comforting closeness which dodges claustrophobia by miles. The overall feeling they give is warm and nostalgic, with the earnestness and beauty of BBC Radiophonic workshop maestros like Delia Derbyshire and Malcolm Clarke.

More recently comparable could be William Basinski (in particular On Time Out of Time), and Brian Eno and Kevin Shields’ joint EP The Weight of History/Only Once Away My Son. In the case of Auditory Colors’ title track and latecomer ‘See See See’, you can feel a slight Jenny Hval vibe; these tracks both recall some of the ambient pieces from Hval’s Blood Bitch. This is in part due to haunting guest vocals from Inga-Lill Farstad, but also some gothic and ghostly hammering piano and concrète. This is more suggestive than Hval’s work, though, and less melodramatic. The thread which connects all this music—and which is so prominent in Auditory Colors­—is a spectral feeling. It’s the there-and-not-there of heavy summer air filling a room.  

Auditory Colors very regularly has this feeling of thick air. Electronic organ creates a fog which diffuses discrete musical shapes into blobs of colour. ‘Greef Signals’ uses some gentle noise structures to suggest rolling waves or hissing bellows—the cry of air as it is thrown unwillingly around. But melody always cuts through this thickness, intercepting it with joy, clarity and dissolving tension. Melodies are often so short as to resolve immediately, only to then loop right back round again. As a listener, this means you’re transfixed but constantly rewarded; lulled to a sense of calm. Auditory Colors is a rich, compelling and active listen; an audio cleanse that’s impossibly packed with ideas but never treads on its own toes.

Auditory Colors is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

John Carpenter—Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

To the uninitiated, John Carpenter’s music must sound like another kitschy experiment; a nostalgic attempt to recapture the appeal of 70s-and-80s creature features. But Carpenter is the real deal—the trailblazer who brought us those very features; (among others) Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York. His style was bold in its simplicity. Even the font used in his titles has become iconic and oft-imitated. Carpenter’s film and soundtrack work provided the still-indelible blueprint for any and all aspiring schlock doctors, and he remains as dark a shadow over Hollywood as ever.

Carpenter saw a late-career resurgence in the mid-2010s. Between playing video games he toured, produced new music and re-recorded old themes. Lost Themes III: Alive After Death is his latest collection of new music. It follows two moodier recent albums with a bright, explosive celebration of horror excess and cheese. Carpenter’s trademark synths bubble over into symphonic grandiosity, where once they burbled and beckoned like a tar pit. ‘Weeping Ghost’ is the most riotously silly track Carpenter has recorded since his theme for In the Mouth of Madness, and sounds like Black Sabbath trying to summon demons to the disco.

Lost Themes III is bold and loose in composition, too. Tracks are mad and balls-out in an energising way. ‘Dead Eyes’ lopes in hunchbacked baroque, ‘Carpathian Darkness’ bastardises, corrupts, inverts and deep-fries Angelo Badalamenti’s ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’. Even when Alive After Death takes pause it does so in style. ‘Cemetery’ more resembles the ominous material of Lost Themes I and II. But it’s supercharged with crunchy electric guitar; less mood piece, more breakdown.

There are so many ideas bursting from this LP, so many perspectives of the macabre. When listening, it's impossible to ignore how enmeshed Carpenter is with the identity of screen horror as a whole. This feels like a victory lap in every sense. Carpenter has lived to see his own legacy and is relishing in it. From the outside, it feels like the director was bullied out of Hollywood for refusing to grovel for budgets, refusing to compromise creatively, refusing to temper his politics and his biting dark comedy. He produced masterpiece after masterpiece in a style nobody wanted to see. Now, desperate for cash, those same institutions recreate and imitate Carpenter’s work—which has become impossibly fashionable. The irony must make him chuckle. There is a wonderful sense of self-parody to Lost Themes III, and a signal from John Carpenter to the world: it’s been forty years, and you’re still playing catch-up.

Alive After Death is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe