Nathan Willett’s passionate vocals are can get a little whiney at times but overall, New age Norms is easy listening for those who like a funky sound with piano. Beyond The Pale is emotional, familiar-sounding and radio-friendly 4th Of July a smooth stroll in the sun. WSĬomplainer, the album opener and one of two teaser tracks for Cold War Kids’ latest album, doesn’t do the Californian indie-rock five-piece any favours, but what follows after is pretty good. A soporific copout? Giving the people what they want? Some bands don’t even have one song.
A kind of horny slowcore, the nine songs on Cry maintain the noirish ambience and slightly creepy lyrics of every single one of their other songs, producing the same unsettling uniformity as Coke bottles or IKEA cabinets. The peculiar and profitable sausage machine run by Greg Gonzalez chugs gradually on, as Cigarettes After Sex album #2 leaves their musical formula preserved in aspic and triple laminated. Not as stark as catalogue highlight I See A Darkness, just a bit more light shines through this time round. Oldham is keeping his renowned alt-country sound firmly in check, on what is actually quite a cheerful sounding BPB collection. SPĪlthough Will Oldham has not starved us of listening material over the last eight years with various albums of covers and reworkings, I Made A Place is the first Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album of original songs since 2011. But seven-and-a-half minute closer Love Is The Answer drifts toward a serene conclusion. Explosions of acoustic breakbeat on the opening tracks reveal their ongoing influence over recent crossover jazz groups like GoGo Penguin and Portico Quartet. Accomplished compositions give way to interludes of carefully controlled chaos. The line-up change seems to have inspired a renewed vitality for the trio. NGĪnother mesmerising album from the Minneapolis jazz revolutionaries, their second since pianist Orrin Evans replaced founding member Ethan Iverson in 2018. Given the high financial stakes, though, I don’t honestly expect to sway you into purchase, so readers are hereby invited to my house to listen to my promo copy. Partly collaborative, part live recordings, often experimental and all unreleased, it’s a glorious, elegaic showcase of his compositional and textural prowess. The only (legal) way of owning this release seems to be dropping £60 or more on a four-LP box set, containing 160 minutes of music by Norwegian jazz trumpeter Arve Henriksen. A potent combination of polish and punch. The French duo’s sixth LP Spiritual Instinct layers clean vocals over molten riffs to create songs that glide along with swan-like serenity on the surface but churn away furiously beneath. (First published in Hebrew in 2011.As the progenitors of blackgaze (a clunky portmanteau that does a disservice to the surprisingly seamless fusion of black metal and shoegaze to which it refers), Alcest might be rather miffed that former tourmates Deafheaven have been given much of the credit. He concludes with some challenging ideas about where we are heading as a species, given the outstanding changes that modern life is now subject to.
The role of empires and capitalism are thoroughly discussed, and Harari gives some interesting ideas on why it was that a then-comparatively backward Europe came to dominate the globe with its principles and core beliefs. Likewise, he analyses the Cognitive Revolution which allowed mankind to develop a consciousness about life and to believe in ephemeral and non-existing phenomena such as religion, culture and the nation state, but which are the essence underlying mankind’s progress. Harari provides some intriguing arguments about how we were all duped by the Agricultural Revolution which turned us into farmers when we had evolved essentially to be hunter-foragers. The author takes a long perspective, from the start of life on earth, through to the various homo genera and to the subsequent dominance of us – the homo sapiens species. This is one – the reader may disagree with elements of Harari’s arguments – but it is nonetheless wholly engaging and stimulating. Occasionally there are books published which simply demand the reader to take a new look on life.
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