First Impressions 012: Rock opera, Cubist pop cool, ambient glow, rap collapse and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello!

You probably didn’t come here for Coachella gossip, but I was intrigued to read this week that Blur’s Damon Albarn chided the crowd at the festival for not singing along. In a few swift moves, he successfully navigated both sides of the parent-child dynamic, moving from straight-out petulant to making threats of leaving if the audience didn’t follow his lead. Damon should know he’d be better off at Glastonbury, in a land where football crowds sing on cue like they’re at a school assembly. Now a heritage act, Blur are perfect for the UK tradition of stadium-mass emotion. Outside of their homeland, a stronghold for music that plays to an older demographic, Blur may well have been the odd ones out at a festival that buzzes on artists often level with celebrity influencer like cool. Playing to legacy is more often reserved for American acts dining out on the formative college years for people over 30 wondering if Coachella is still for them or if they can fork out for a ticket now they’re fully adulting.

Sales were below expectations, moving with recent times that has seen some festivals fully cancelled only two weeks after going on sale, particularly Splendour In The Grass and Falls Festival in Australia. Curation is obviously a part of it, but it’s bigger than that. There may be a reason that’s both simple and complex as to why there’s a particular run of festivals being cancelled over the past year: the corporations who run a lot of them have disempowered young people and their agency in cultural engagement. They’re no longer singing the song they’ve been handed. Once that happens, corporates will tear down the economic platform they’ve built to game live music and look elsewhere. Similarly to how streaming services see music as a data set, the real hurt for music comes from not seeing it as music but as a value proposition for shareholders.

Working in music here in Australia, use of the term ‘grassroots’ is suddenly being lathered on hard by an industry in a self-confirmed crisis. The question now is, where does the revitalisation of grassroots ventures begin, and what does it look like, now the landscape is all a bit of a Blur?

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OK, let’s go:

If I Don’t Make It, I Love U - Still House Plants: Still House Plants’ sound continues to evolve with the urgency of three people under the weight of a cracked mosaic of influences, yet they’re so coolly assured that for all their experimentation, they never lose sight of themselves. Themselves being a three-piece band of vocals, drums, and guitar, stealthily making a minimal rock setup somehow squeeze the emo out of its ringfence of emotions, and with an elasticity that makes them a pure rush to witness. There’s a lot of talk about the many and varied parts that go into this band. Maybe they’re a trainspotter’s delight, but that denies them their own art – a very unique declaration of independence.

Harbour Century – Eunuchs: It might be fair to suggest that Sydney’s Eunuchs could be how Slint could have turned out if they went to Conservatorium of Music and studied under both Van Dyke Parks and Frank Zappa. You might also, to coin a phrase, call this group of up to 17 players a bunch of sweet and tender hooligans. In the Jekyll and Hyde mindset of this sprawling, bloodyminded double album, arrangements match the ambition to bring the orchestra pit and mosh pit into one beautifully crazy cavity. Like any good rock opera, emotions run high and low, never middle out, and Eunuchs pull it off with sophistication that can switch hit to a decidedly Australian style blunt force. Lightning in a bottle? More like lightning in a beer can.       

Canoga to Ha’ikū – Turn On The Sunlight: The latest from the LA collective of revolving musicians leaves a scorched trail echoing their name, here in duo mode with mainstays Jesse Peterson and Carlos Niño for a twinkling stream of synth and percussion floats. You’re usually guaranteed a masterful balancing act of playful freeform and focus with anything Niño touches, and it’s great to hear his sensibility in a close-knit space. Radiating with the sparks of the low-lit but innately vivid cosmic jazz from the 70s and 80s, take flight and realign your chakras.

Summer Of Love - Jess RIbeiro: The songs on Jess Ribeiro’s new album sound like they needed to escape from an air pocket and into the open. They spill out like impromptu dissertations on the creeping dull of hard living and its accumulative dread, moving waywardly like liquid spilled on a floor. Ribeiro is in thrall to our cracked sense of being when patterns we expect deviate and renders it weird and compelling. Instruments feel more touched than played, invoking a hanging energy that suspends us all in its orbit. (Jim White’s drumming is a familiar signal to such kinetic interplay) Ribeiro’s humour, sly, sometimes absurd, and often flipping the script mid-verse is a twist, doubling back to this album’s pursuit of innocence. A reflection of the album’s title, nature, animals, and children are the comforts getting us closer to the home we all need. After a time hibernating inside her mind, Ribeiro lets her long hot summer simmer at the heart of this album.

Like A Ribbon – John Glacier: The Hackney rapper cradles the same grimy soul Tricky blueprinted with Maxinquaye, though it’s even woozier in its narcotic pull, and listening to her drawling style, you could imagine her playing the disaffected teen version of Martina Topley-Bird in any biopic. Skeletal production from heavy hitters like Flume and Vegyn as well as Kwes Darko maps the shaky foundations propping up the melodrama of Glacier’s life outlook, full of echoing guitar lines hovering on the verge of collapse. This is bedraggled immaculate: delivered with more than a few hints of fuck you and realised into self-empowerment.

LATE SLAP – Dana Gavanski: The Canadian artist’s assured third album is both highly mannered and angular pop, cut like a hedge manicured by a Cubist. The cool, art-school eccentricity of British music from Robert Wyatt to early Roxy Music runs through her ornate arrangements, though signaling through the often dizzyingly shifting rhythms and melodic whimsy is the sound of someone being tender with themselves. That’s probably the trickiest thing to carry off here, and Gavanski does it with an air of revelation that gives this album its soul.

It Will Be Fairly Obvious – b. michaael: The Orange Milk label’s Seth Graham didn’t so much tip us to this as tag our Instagram wondering why we weren’t already stuck on it like shit to a blanket. Fair call – we have two longform pieces here from the Vancouver artist that paint moods with a vaporous air and slow-motion flux. The quieter end of Jeff Astin’s distinctly upended surrealism as Xiphiidae comes to mind on the first piece, the second drifts with more glowing hues atop its magnetic pull.  There’s no real revelation in sound here, but this is finely sculpted drift to absorb yourself in.  

Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.