Big Thief - "Two Hands"
(4AD / Beggars / Indigo, since October 11th)
The uninterrupted reverence that this band from Brooklyn receives, especially from American pop critics, is scary. There is almost no negative criticism of the four albums by Big Thief; their singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker is worshiped as a fragile muse of indie rock. She looks like a Goth girl, wears torn T-shirts and sometimes shaves her head, at the same time she carries her songs of self-search and nature mystery but so childishly sweet, that the overall picture probably best on the term hardcore -Liberty brings.
After their "We're sitting on the green meadow and waiting for the aliens" album "UFOF" in spring magazines like Pitchfork and Stereogum already caused fainting and ecstasy in the spring, Big Thief put even more breath with "Two Hands" and Plucked after - and again almost universally languished. One wonders so slowly, what is actually the big deal here.
For at first glance, "Two Hands" seems nothing more than a (now more audible) scratched grunge artifacts update of those provocatively decelerated folk-internalizations that have perfected, for example, the cowboy junkies or Mazzy Star almost 30 years ago. But Pop is digesting itself, as allegedly the history per se, continuously itself, so that the solemn return to the campfire of folk rock perhaps almost compellingly follows the zeitgeist.
Even then, at the turn of the eighties into the nineties, society and history made great strides that caused excessive demands and retreats. Today, the rapid change in events is not just a general sense of impending apocalypse (Trump, Brexit, climate change, capitalism blues), but also a constant nagging and howling about it on Twitter and other social media. The classic rebelliousness and the noise of rock'n'roll would simply fizzle out in this din, if there were any relevant impulses from this spectrum at all. Carefully practiced mindfulness of fatalistic siren song is the rebellious gesture du jour - and Big Thief are the high priests of this freak folk revival.
After all, we were in the mid-nineties, as a post-9/11 reaction, so to speak, at a point when indie musicians like Devendra Banhart or Animal Collective fled into the bushes of their beards and love of nature. The perfector of this crunchy music was and is the hypersensitive pop solipsist Bon Iver. Against his experiments with electronics and autotune vocals, Big Thief and her frontwoman Lenker not only set a still rare femininity in this genre of mousy men, they also lure the audience alienated by too much artificially into audiences and pop discourse with consistent authenticity. "Two Hands" is so exaggeratedly recorded live in a log cabin studio in the desert between the USA and Mexico, that you can hear the dry wooden floorboards creaking, as the musicians move in their slow, warm sound ever closer to each other: Fade into you - to cuddle against the evil out there.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 42
MIRROR ONLINE
Playlist on Spotify
1. Jaimie Branch: Prayer For Amerikkka Pt. 1 & 2
2. Petter Eldh & Koma Saxo: Coma Tema
3. Caribou: Home
4. Michael Kiwanuka: Hero
5. Moor Mother feat. Saul Williams: Black Flight
6. Matana Roberts: Her Mighty Waters Run / Wild Fire Bare / Fit To Be Tied
7. Battles feat. Xenia Rubinos: They Played It Twice
8. Lucy Dacus: In The Air Tonight
9. The Dusseldorf Düsterboys: Oh mom
10. Sufjan Stevens, Timo Andres: IV
According to the band, "Two Hands" was the Earth-bound counterpart to the just five-month-old "UFOF", which placed salvation and hope in the stars and in the spiritual. With Neil-Young-Gegniedel ("distress") and handfesterem gesture the same anxious questions are now addressed to Mother Nature. The world's pain is boundless and the yearning for security comes from every pleading line of verse: "The wound has no direction Everybody needs a home and deserves protection," states Lenker in "Forgotten Eyes". "Not," the central piece of the album, is a series of invalids, a manifesto of denial that cries into eternity with guitar noise: "Not beginning / Not the Crowd / Not winning / Not the planet ..." and so on.
But if all is nothing, what is the consoling nucleus, the magnetic kernel of this music for critics and audiences? In the love and togetherness of the Great Cave, of course, who set up Big Thief. From this cocoon, this intimacy-commune hands us both hands to regression: Somehow we exist / In the folds, now Adrianne Lenker sings seductively like the serpent Kaa to the ingratiating hissing and But do you have to trust thieves? (5.0) Andreas Borcholte
Price query time:
14.10.2019, 11:14
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Big thief
Two Hands
label:
4ad / Beggars Group / Indigo
Price:
EUR 9.09
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Carla dal Forno - "Look Up Sharp"
(Kallista / Cargo, from 18 October)
As always in life applies to Carla dal Forno: Just do not be fooled by the recorder. Right in the second song on the second album of the Australian citizen of the world, such a flute plays on, just as crooked and school-oriented, as one knows from the most common of all weapons used in early musical education. But "Look Up Sharp" is therefore far from a childlike or even friendly-minded record. The artist turns to synth- and psych-pop - and decides in ten sometimes nasty songs, what should become of the corpses in their freezer.
Dal Fornos debut album "You Know What It's Like" sounded three years ago like music from a twisted secret system under the Berghain: dub, nico singing, disembodied choirs. What disturbs you when you live in Berlin and belong to the label collective Blackest Ever Black. But now dal Forno lives in London and does everything alone. In the style of a cheerless solo entertainer she uses "Look Up Sharp" synthesizer, bass, guitar, percussion and computer. Her voice is still reminiscent of Nico, but her songs now sound like the one-bedroom apartment version of Warpaint.
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM an intercepted mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
What has remained from Berlin, are open bills. "So Much Better" is one of the nastier kiss-offs of recent pop history, despite its hopping bass figure: An ex-lover is back in town, and Forno weighs the pros and cons of an encounter. "I'm glad I have you pain," she confesses without apparent residual empathy in the voice. And finally, after the meeting, "I'm happy that you're still the same and I'm so much better." Life goes on and the bass hops over to the next piece.
Four instrumentals with cello, marimba and the mentioned recorder set strategic resting points between dal Fornos settlements. They testify to the musical development of the artist, but far behind the disturbing effects of her narrative pieces. "Do not Follow Me", for example, does not report from the internet, but sees itself as a response to the soon to be 40 years old "A Forest" by The Cure. At that time, Robert Smith was singing about men lured by an imaginary woman into the forest. Today dal Forno takes the role of this woman and gives the creeps a lesson in victim-perpetrator reversal.
The tape rustles to ominous, a synthesizer points the way to retro-science fiction, and the bass dissolves in some poisonous chemical sauce. So funny and mean can Carla dal Forno be. (6.5) Daniel Gerhardt
Price query time:
14.10.2019, 11:10 clock
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Carla Dal Forno
Look Up Sharp
label:
Kallista / Cargo
Price:
EUR 12.29
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Jaimie Branch - "Fly Or The II: Bird Dogs Of Paradise"
(International Anthem / Indigo, from 18th October)
The 36-year-old trumpeter Jaimie Branch is such an important gender equality fighter in jazz because she answers such questions unequivocally. With dynamite, so with their music. Power as Sovereignty: In the first song, "Birds Of Paradise", we hear for two minutes only the mbira, a kalimba-like instrument, and some plucked cello, until Branch plays the first note. Which bandleader does she follow?
In the central piece "Prayer For Amerikkka Pt. 1 & 2", the band plays a slow blues, and it takes another two minutes for the trumpet to set the first screams with the damper in the high position. And now Branch! Almost like a preacher in the south (Branch is white, comes from a bad part of Brooklyn, was a long time in Chicago, now lives on the East Coast again). "We have a bunch of wide eyed racists!", We have a problem with naive racists. A twelve-stringed guitar begins, the groove begins to fly - the sermon leads to a Mexican-American borderline story. A Latin harmony in minor takes over, and Branch adds a mariachi trumpet on top. More important than the text is the sheer intensity of the presentation. Logical that this album is a mix of live recordings and studio sessions in London after the final tour.
"Fly Or Die" was her debut as a bandleader two years ago on the cool label International Anthem from Chicago. Jamie Branch ended up on the map of global connoisseurs. That's why the title of the successor is so directly linked to it. The core of their band could be seen last year in Germany: Lester St. Louis on cello, Jason Ajemian on double bass and the famous Chad Taylor on drums. At the last jazz festival in Berlin, Branch played virtuously with moments that have become rare in the international circus: is the form going out of control, should it be? Does she stumble because she has one in tea - or is that a musical trance? Although it's jazz, Branch does not fit into any category here: country, folk, blues - the neighborhood of folk music and free jazz sometimes recalls the early Ornette Coleman.
Always a good time: We are listening to an artist who has brutally mastered her instrument but has just freed herself from it. She says: Forget technology, it's all about the sound, but she says it at the peak of her mastery. This is a different perspective than punk, although punk influences everything in Branch's attitude.
In a successful promo video she succinctly sums it up: I want to travel around, play music, have fun, you know . The fact that this fun also includes the overcoming of pain and still a lot of chaos, makes this album clear at all times. At the same time, we must be grateful to all the gods that Jaimie Branch has survived ten years of heroin. (8.9) Tobi Müller
Price query time:
14.10.2019, 11:05 clock
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Jaimie Branch
Fly Or the II: Bird Dogs of Paradise
label:
International Anthem / Indigo
Price:
EUR 10.62
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Sufjan Stevens - "The Decalogue" (performed by Timo Andres)
(Asthmatic Kitty / Cargo, 18 October)
There are two types of Sufjan Stevens albums: one for the audience, the other for the artist himself. The former appear only every five years, just enough to confirm the still valid rule of the songwriters. The latter are composed of modern classical music and electronic soundtracks, of ambitious rap music and planetary prog rock, compilations with left-over songs or exactly one hundred Christmas carols. New in the catalog now: "The Decalogue", the ten-part piano score for a dance performance by Justin Peck. An album from the second category.
While Stevens likes to extend his folk and pop songs to ambient outros, noise speckles and other nervousness, he composes his supposedly avant-garde works from the other direction. Fun fact for Stevens fanatics: "The Decalogue" is the quietest album in the almost 25-year career of the US songwriter. The rigor and intransigence of Peck's choreographies are reflected in the piano pieces, smaller experiments with asymmetries bring together dance and music. Stevens himself describes "The Decalogue" as a collection of etudes based on romantic-modernist tradition. As if a piano student had tried to impress Claude Debussy.
The role of this piano student takes over the actually over-qualified composer Timo Andres, a world converter between Brahms and Boards Of Canada, which belongs to Stevens' inner Brooklyn circle as well as Peck. Of the sleepless nights, the latter wants to have spent over keyboard and sheet music, in Andres' interpretation nothing more to hear. With him, "The Decalogue" sounds light-footed and -weight, despite all strictness and tradition obligation. There are moments on this album where the music almost seems to jump.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Stevens revealed earlier this year how he and Peck found each other. The choreographer wrote the composer a long letter requesting permission to use one of his pieces for a dance performance. Stevens replied that he did not care, because he had no idea about ballet anyway. So what does people who feel the same way expect on "The Decalogue"? The entrance to a new world, for example. Music that demands employment, but also rewards with the same aha moments that characterize every good pop song. And maybe even the end of the distinction between Stevens first and second class albums. (8.0) Daniel Gerhardt
Price query time:
14.10.2019, 11:07 clock
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Sufjan Stevens & Timo Andres
The Decalogue
label:
Asthmatic Kitty / Cargo
Price:
EUR 14,49
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Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)
