The Predatory Wasp
Downtempo R&B jams galore on Summer Walker’s new EP Life On Earth, from which this collab with PARTYNEXTDOOR stands out, largely due to the production which sits in a very sweet spot between melancholic gloom and hopeful longing. Vocals from both are perfectly on-point, resulting in a finely balanced and affecting portrait of a relationship under strain.
Jadu Heart are a UK duo who I first came across via last year’s excellent Melt Away LP, with Zorah Come Home making an especially lasting impression, sitting somewhere between Jai Paul and Little Dragon. Walk The Line is one of a series of singles they’ve been releasing this year, and which seem to be moving further from their electronic roots towards more fully-fledged songs and lush production. It’s a really catchy, haunting record, and a proper duet – which I really think we could use more of in modern music.
Rolling it back to 2018 today and a record I don’t think got enough attention at the time. Seeing Eye Dog is the second track on Young Galaxy’s album Down Time, which along with the equally brilliant Under My Wing completes an outrageously strong opening pair. Young Galaxy announced an indefinite hiatus not long after the release of this album, although recently have resurfaced on a couple of collabs with Euro Berlin and Amsterdam Cosm, but Seeing Eye Dog is a fine place to start with their extensive back catalogue.
I’ve loved pretty much everything Julianna Barwick has done over the past decade, so waking up to a new album of hers today was a very welcome surprise. Healing Is A Miracle is everything I’d hoped it would be: immersive, soothing, emotional, fragile, beautiful. Oh, Memory is an early highlight, and further cements my yearning for live shows come back in some form really soon, as if I don’t have the opportunity to listen to this in a church or similarly reverential venue I’m going to be very disappointed.
Even on an album as brilliant as SAULT’s debut Untitled (Black Is), Wildfires stands out. Like much of the LP it focusses on the theme of police oppression towards the black community, with lyrics like “Take off your badge / We all know it was murder” striking a tone somewhere between pleading and resignedly furious. It’s a remarkably affecting track, and even more remarkably they’re giving away the entire album free on their website, or if you’re really feeling it you can get a CD or double vinyl on Bandcamp.
I feel like it’s all been a bit serious on the TPW recently, so here’s a dose of carefree funk for you courtesy of Phenomenal Handclap Band, and a track that came out a couple of months ago on their album PHB via the always excellent Toy Tonics label. There’s a definite channelling of Chic, especially towards the back of the track, but that’s no bad thing, and the spoken-word bridge and semi-chanted chorus are both wonderfully retro and unashamedly positive: a beaming grin of a record and one that will be on repeat for some time to come.
One of my favourite tracks of 2018 was ELSZ’s Are You Ok?: a tight, soulful gem with warm vocals and even warmer Rhodes-y chords that makes everything feel brighter, calmer. Listening to Your Rage Is Necessary, Part. I it’s difficult to believe it’s the same artist, so complete is its departure from that carefree record in pretty much every aspect. Turbulent, seething, loosely structured and utterly mesmerising, one would expect this is a single from their forthcoming LP, which will be “dedicated to victims and survivors of gender violence”. On the basis of this at least, we’re in for something quite extraordinary.
Special Request’s Spectral Frequency came out last week on R&S, and is very much an EP of two halves. The title track is pretty much what you’d expect from a ‘typical’ Special Request record – taught jungle breaks and vocal stabs – with the second track Inverse Request an interesting experiment in filtering out all the low end: a sketchy rave transmission from another galaxy. It’s the second two tracks where it really comes to life though, and Family Doggo is a warm analog hug of a track, all reverb-heavy hats and hazily shimmering pads, which is exactly what I need right now.
A new 12 minute song from Sufjan, and the lead single from his forthcoming album. There’s really very little more I need to say about this, other than it seems to be the culmination of almost everything he’s done in his career so far, with elements of folk, noise and electronica vying for space amongst lyrical themes both religious and nationalistic. If this is illustrative of the album, we’re in for a real treat come 25 September.
Turtle Funk is taken from the new Patricia (aka Max Ravitz) album Maxyboy: his second full-length outing on Ghostly International following 2017’s Several Shades Of The Same Colour which I liked very much. Like its predecessor it could be loosely described as atmospheric, breaks-driven techno, but while Several Shades…felt restrictive and gloomy, there’s an optimistic bounce about many of the tracks on Maxyboy, not least in the playful acid lines and shimmering pools of Turtle Funk.
The Predatory Wasp 