The US jazz-hop musician James Craven who performs as Jameth released the LP Wacky-Fun yesterday.
Jameth
A seven track album, which as it suggests on the tin doesn’t take itself too seriously, with mundane subjects being taken to an extremis parody of themselves, yet, within the eclectic mix of material lay one or two gems.
My selection of which is the antepenultimate song – Mr. Frog – an acerbic look at societal structures in which irrelevant differences are magnified into warring chasms while all quietly acquiescing to a mantra of inane platitudes.
There is no website or social media page to which I can link for more information.
The five track EP takes the journey on a wide journey of soul and folk influenced songs, though each being of different texturing, with some led by strings bowed or strummed, others keys, there is a commonality of tie which is the emotionally charged voice which immediately catches the listeners attention and holds them entranced through the roughly seventeen minutes release.
My pick of the release being the middle track Steps.
Hailey Livingston is an RnB creator from Los Angeles (USA) who released the LP Clap Back on the 11th.
Hailey Livingston
An eleven track album which contemplates the complexities of interpersonal relationships with friends, lovers and family.
This is an atypical recommendation to the music typically featured and although instinctively not something I would typically recommend, particularly with numerous tracks adding vocoder effects, which, as longer stay readers always finds me antagonistic, I do strongly suggest adding to the playlist of ‘essential bookmarks of life in the ’10s’.
The sheer depth of emotional connectivity makes Clap Back an album of its time with a narrative of contemporary confusions of life in a world contrasted by pixelated and physical relationships.
The three, to me, stand out tracks of the eleven on the album are the opener Meet Cute, which sets the tone for the release as a whole with its heady fires of early day relationship expectation and latter day confusion.
The sixth song – I don’t Hate Men?, a piano led composition, is a more melancholic and jaded perspective of disappointment and abusive power imbalance.
My pick of the release being the penultimate song, Elegy, which though of sad countenance recalls fondest memories of strong familial ties.
The US experimental-dystopia project The Hathaway Family Plot released the LP A Flat Thing yesterday.
The Hathaway Family Plot
An eleven track, roughly forty one minutes, album (available on bandcamp) which requires the listener to put away any preconceived thoughts of song construction prior to hitting play.
A stretch of disparate instrumentation crackles through the room – on occasion forming agitated clumps on others a flat-line of no-wave, yet always holding an attentive audience whilst inviting them to wander in to dark spaces in their mind, as the looming oppressive presence of the tracks trigger the synapses.
My pick of the release being the fourth composition – Monetizing Fear.
The experimental electronica musician Chad Fjersta from Los Angeles (USA) who performs as Fjerstad will be releasing the LP 8-Circuit Neurorgasmic Trigger on the 11th.
Fjerstad
The ten track album (available on bandcamp) opens with the five and a half minutes of Banging The Guixian Tam-Tam – which is a luxurious glitched dubstep that fills the room with mesmerising, trance inducing voices-off and melting threads of silky electronica tethered by loping bass cuts that rumble through the speakers like beetles swarming in damp, rotting wood deep inside a pine forest.
