Listening to Excess of Loss, the new album from Xol Meissner, one can’t help but be transported to a different time and place, where the haunting baritone vocals recall Scott Walker, Nick Cave, and Jacques Brel, and the instrumental accompaniment consists of a hammered lap steel. The combination invokes a dream-like state that is dark and mysterious but oddly intoxicating. Excess of Loss draws inspiration from many places, but still sounds like absolutely nothing else.
Xol Meissner is the alias of New York City-based composer Mauro Hertig. Classically trained and the 2019 Laureate of the Voix-Nouvelles Académie in France, Hertig had regularly used text in scored works prior to writing songs full-time. His unique style of lap steel was previously…
Category: art pop
David Garland may not be a household name for many, but he’s a singer-songwriter, composer, instrument designer, illustrator, graphic designer, journalist, and former New York City radio personality. Over the years, he has recorded with a diverse range of artists, including John Zorn, Sufjan Stevens, Meredith Monk, and Sean Lennon. The latter described Garland as someone who “pushes the limits of acceptable harmony and dissonance, yet never at the expense of beauty”. It’s an impressive resume that barely scratches the surface, and his wild, eclectic work continues on a new album that sees the multifaceted artist grappling with loss, specifically his wife’s death from cancer six years ago.
The Spark was recorded primarily in Garland’s…
Google “Tom Boogizm” and the internet coughs up a blank: a lone Boiler Room set, a now-defunct NTS Radio show, a rarely-tended-to SoundCloud page. A Boomkat one-sheet for Dancin’ in the Streets, the DJ and producer’s latest release under the name Rat Heart, offers precious little clarity, just that he hails from Wigan, a town in the northwest of England. Until recently, the British online music retailer was also the only place one could purchase the record. The likes of Cindy Lee, Alabaster dePlume, and Standing on the Corner have all delayed streaming’s instant gratification with their latest projects, but Dancin’ in the Streets’ relative inaccessibility felt more like a protective measure. Most albums create realms you can enter and exit with a tap; step inside this one, and…
‘Cerulean R’ is the expanded 15th anniversary reissue of first Baths record, ‘Cerulean’.
The “R” in the title refers to the tagline “Reissue, Remix, Resurface, Remaster”. The Release itself is split into 3 constituent parts: “Reissue” LP1 is a reissue of the original record. “Remix” LP2 contains 8 unheard remixes created in 2010-2011, around the original release.“Re surface” LP3 contains 8 unsung Baths songs.
It’s fitting that Baths’ debut album Cerulean is on Anticon, as Will Wiesenfeld’s music blends glitchy, hip-hop-tinged beats with delicate atmospheres. Cerulean sounds like the missing link between Bibio, Flying Lotus, Toro y Moi, and Dilla, to name a few, but Wiesenfeld has his own sound within that realm. He keeps his intricate…
Listening to an Asher White record, you get the sense that she approaches songwriting like an interior designer. She treats her songs like rooms she can move throughout, rearranging their furniture — pushing the couch from one corner to another, angling a chair ever so slightly in a different direction.
“The sink thank you,” which opens her latest album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, comes together like move-in day, starting as an empty room with nothing but some muffled, tentative strings before other additions begin to fill the space: slot machine sound effects, snare drums, faraway chimes, a thumping bassline, keys that sound straight out of Fiona Apple’s “Valentine,” a smattering of handclaps; until finally, White’s…
Even on her debut EP, at just 22 years old, feeo sounded like the weariest of old souls.
She sang of a choking fear, of bombs falling like tears, of staying up to hear her lover leave because she couldn’t bear the thought of waking up to “haunted sheets.” Over toe-scuffing downtempo beats and wistfully unfurled synths, she asked questions — “Are we in love or is it just the drugs, babe?”; “Being lost is a bit like being free, isn’t it?” — in a tone that suggested she harbored few illusions about the answers.
It wasn’t just the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics that were so striking. It was feeo’s effortless balance of plaintiveness and composure, vulnerability and control. Her guarded, whisper-soft musings had a way of unexpectedly blossoming…
From the moment he started making music over two decades ago, Shutaro Noguchi has been in constant motion. Born in Japan, Noguchi has been based in the United States for 20 years, primarily in Louisville, where he became a player in the local music community, releasing solo psych-rock epics while participating in experimental groups like Equipment Pointed Ankh and the alt-country collective The Roadhouse Band (where he contributed to contemporary Americana breakout Ryan Davis’ latest album). Noguchi recently relocated to his home country, but not before recording On the Run with that latter outfit.
His latest album, On the Run, plays out like a reflective road trip and a bittersweet farewell tour rolled into one, an atlas of all the sonic…
In the novel Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler wrote of Montreal that “its salvation [is] the continuing devotion to pleasure by our movers and shakers.” The city exudes a self-assured, continental coolness, and its relative affordability makes it admirably hospitable to its artists. But Richler is right that this coolness takes effort; it’s an act of devotion rather than a natural endowment to the Québécois.
Hélène Barbier is one such devoted mover and shaker. Relocating to Montreal from France some 10-plus years ago, she’s put in the work: first with the lo-fi punk outfit Moss Lime and then as co-founder of label/zine/all-around scene-saver Celluloid Lunch, alongside her equally industrious husband Joe Chamandy of…
Titling her new EUSEXUA companion album Afterglow might have suggested that FKA twigs was set to use her second album of 2025 to take things from the pulverising, euphoric beats of the club towards contemplative, hazy conversations back at hers for the afters. Press play on opening track ‘Love Crimes’, though, and it seems she has simply stepped outside for a cigarette break, before returning inside to be smacked in the face with techno bass even harder and more ferocious than anything on the first album.
Inspired by her experiences clubbing in Prague while filming for The Crow, EUSEXUA was a dazzling techno-pop reinvention for twigs, with both her most sugary pop hooks and hardest beats. Across her first two albums, LP1 and MAGDALENE…
DOGA, new studio album by Juana Molina, the eighth full-length of her career and her first album of new compositions in eight years.
For DOGA she has been trying to master the furiously difficult world of analogue synths, hunching over instruments that resemble old-fashioned telephone switchboards to invent sounds that don’t rely on pre-programmed waveforms. She recorded everything she made but became overwhelmed by the hundreds of hours of tape. It prompted her to work with a producer, Emilio Haro, for the first time since her debut. DOGA is deeper and more spacious than its predecessor, with synthesised orchestral touches: the guitars on ‘Miro Todo’ (I See Everything), says Molina, sound like violins that “are somehow out of…
Anna von Hausswolff’s sixth studio album is being trailed as the 39-year-old Swede’s pivot towards pop, which you could say is all relative. For the last decade, Von Hauswolff has dealt in music that is solemn, echo-laden, heavy on the drone of her beloved pipe organ and fully deserving of the adjective gothic.
Her work has elicited comparisons to Nico and Diamanda Galás; 40 years ago, it might have been packaged in a hauntingly abstract Vaughan Oliver sleeve and released on 4AD. She has collaborated with Swans, Sunn O))) and the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room. Her last album, 2020’s All Thoughts Fly, was a collection of instrumentals, recorded on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ in a church in…
With Fur & Gold, Bat for Lashes – aka Natasha Khan – brings a fairytale quality and air of mystery to her music, performing a delicate balancing act between everyday emotions and the power of fantasy. As the title suggests, there’s something gorgeous but raw about her songs, which fly from spare British chamber folk to shades of lavish rock, pop, and dance as she throws herself into stories that update the traditions of other iconic female artists. She’s a warrior princess of the moors with only her steed to keep her company on “Horse and I,” a song whose dramatic sweep would do Kate Bush proud; on the fable-like sensual duet “Trophy,” Khan sings “creatures of mercy/shoot them down and set me free” with Björk-like urgency. Despite Fur & Gold’s unabashedly mystical vibe, Khan emphasizes…
‘Miss America’, the centrepiece of Jennifer Walton’s stylish, painful debut record, sits us down in a hotel room near JFK airport, watching on as Walton learns that her father has been diagnosed with cancer. The Sunderland-born musician had been touring the US for the first time, drumming with indie band Kero Kero Bonito, and now grief greys everything out. Faltering piano and hushed strings accompany gothic dispatches from the tour van: “Cattle farm and broke down shack / Strip-mall, drug deal, panic attacks.”
Walton’s gentle vocals are deadpan, with the record’s tension brought by her penmanship (encompassing fiction, folksy sayings and blunt diary entries) and her sharp, surprising maximalism. Few songs this year have…
Recorded in Lisbon in 2023, ‘Cornucopia Live’ documents Björk’s expansive tour, presenting high-quality live versions of the album’s best tracks alongside updated fan favorites like ‘Isobel’ and ‘Pagan Poetry’.
Björk has always gone all-out on her live productions, and ‘Cornucopia’ was her most monumental tour yet, billed as an attempt to unite her various interests – nature, technology and sound. She directed the ambitious event herself of course, but brought in help from James Merry, and had Andrew Thomas Huang, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Pierre-Alain Giraud, Nick Knight, Tobias Gremmler and Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton-Jones along for the ride. There’s a filmed version recorded beautifully by cinematographer…
The typical Macy Rodman LP is a sprawling codex of meta-references, in-jokes, and cultural critique couched in accessible synth-pop. Though there’s a common thread of danceable retro pastiche running through her discography (revealing a particular fondness for Haçienda-era New Order and the Day-Glo kitsch of late-aughts club music), albums like 2019’s Endless Kindness and 2021’s Unbelievable Animals were clearly composed with close listening in mind. Beneath the cybernetic sheen, there’s goofball parody, meticulously detailed confessional writing, and an enthusiasm for genre-agnostic experimentation. On her latest full-length outing, SCALD, her fascination with filmic femme fatales adopts a harder-edged sound that pushes her songcraft into weirder — yet no…
Jeff Tobias wrestles a frantic saxophone in psych-jazz Sunwatchers and a subtle bass counterpoint in serene and minimalist Modern Nature. Here in a solo project, he splits the difference, amping up indie melodies with proggy, jittery, staccato arrangements, and reinforcing dystopian scenarios with enticing, nearly pop tunefulness.
One Hundredfold Now in this Age takes a strong political stance, but sweetens the polemic with indie drift and dream. “End It,” allow only a brief interval of synth-and-strings shimmer before unspooling its insurgent chorus. “Burn the American flag, one hundred times a day,” Tobias croons, his tone unbothered, his message aflame, as a glittering fusion jazz fanfare goes off in his wake. The song was inspired by American…
Marta Forsberg’s new record Archaeology of Intimacy is something of a surprise. Things are kept short and simple, and sometimes ever so slightly sharp. Forsberg’s languorous, quietly investigative style is now attuned to a trickier yet still seductive line of attack.
The listener’s relationship with Archaeology of Intimacy soon becomes very clear: we are here to be still, and actively listen to these quiet but often surprising songs. This injunction is not a bad thing – a lot of what makes this album so moreish is only revealed with patience and attention. Archaeology of Intimacy is not demanding your opinion. But neither should it be consumed piecemeal or in passing.
The opening two tracks are there to call us to…
With his score for Yorgos Lanthimos’s gothic fantasies Poor Things and Kind of Kindness, Joscelin Dent-Pooley (aka Jerskin Fendrix) has proven that his skills in sonic storytelling are excellent. His quirky and elaborate instrumentals capture the restless nature of the former’s protagonist, Bella Baxter, a woman with the transplanted brain of an infant, who explores the good and bad of the world.
Composed largely between the artist’s film score work, Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire is an attempt to soundtrack Dent-Pooley’s own life story. Raised in the West Midlands, the songs are infused with references from his formative years, restoring the memories in detailed lyrics on the opening ‘Beth’s Farm’: “We kiss beneath the apple tree…
Best known for the intricate guitar-work which guided the warm, woody folk-rock of her 2022 Grammy-winning album Revealer, Madison Cunningham opens her latest project Ace instead with swathes of rippling piano.
The instrument is the main protagonist across the record, pairing sweetly with the Californian musician’s crystal-clear vocals on tracks like lead single ‘My Full Name’, which recalls the intimate art-pop of Regina Spektor.
Elsewhere the album is more fluid and impressionistic, piano swirling restlessly amongst moody clarinet and strings. Songs shift like the weather, disintegrating into choppy rhythms and murky chords before cohering into choruses again, echoing Cunningham’s lyrical…
…features a brand-new song titled “Decoy” as well as demos of “Cosmic Joke” and “Truth.”
“Enter the room of nothing / Enter the room of me,” sings Haley Fohr on ‘Skeleton Key’, backed by the buzz of organ and electric guitar. She towers above, her voice theatrical and macabre, a quality that’s always been there in her contralto delivery, but never as bombastic.
That room could be the basement studio in Chicago where Halo On the Inside first took shape. For eight months, she locked herself away there, embarking on long, late-night writing sessions. Like the record’s cover, she existed in a vacuum, exploring new sounds, synths and parts of herself. Time and place get wobbly when you’re up all night on your own in a windowless room. Fohr found…