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Album of the week:
Kamasi Washington, the heavyweight Yoda of the new Afro-American jazz, likes to compare the black experience, i.e. the reality of life of black Americans, with the arduous climb of a mountain.
But if, as he once said in an interview with SPIEGEL, you break through the gray cloud cover and take a short rest and pause in the sublime silence, you can let your gaze wander and get a new perspective of the world.
The saxophonist Washington illustrates this epiphany in his spiritually charged music with heavenly choirs and the full orchestral power of his 50-strong ensemble from LA at peak times, most recently on the album epic »Heaven & Earth«.
The British band Sault are now stepping into these jazz tracks and a few others that you would not have guessed.
We still don't know much about this musician collective, who with »Air« have now released their amazing sixth album since 2019.
The only thing that seems certain is that the creative mind and leader behind it is the London music producer and musician Dean Josiah Cover aka Inflo, who is known for his work with artists such as Michael Kiwanuka, Adele and Little Simz.
Sault, often supported by singer Cleo Sol and rapper Kid Sister, have so far dedicated themselves to the Black Experience in various forms of R&B, soul, funk, hip and trip hop.
At the recent peak of Black Lives Matter, following the murder of the African American George Floyd by a white US police officer, they released the touching but also optimistically lively double album »Untitled (Black Is)« and »Untitled (Rise)« – and were celebrated as an anonymous but also universal voice of the movement.
Last year »Nine« dived deep into the emotional world of the Afro-Brits with urban beats.
And now the spectrum is once again spectacularly expanded, regardless of commercial losses or fan confusion.
The basic motif of »Air« remains the metaphorical, but unfortunately also literal struggle for air of black people in a racist, repressive white majority society, painfully manifested in the plea »I can't breathe«, which has turned into a meme, by the African Americans Floyd and Eric Garner, who were killed in police operations .
Groove, soul and R&B can only be found in trace elements in the seven largely instrumental tracks on the album.
Sault's new sound draws its dazzling power from soaring choral singing by the British Music Confectionery Choir and a full orchestra with a swaying string section.
The result, if the listener lets themselves be embraced and lifted up, comes very close to the intended effect of Kamasi Washington's mountain allegory: this music opens up spaces to breathe.
Of course, Afro-American music has always sought this out, even off the beaten path of traditional blues and gospel.
Alice Coltrane's spiritual jazz, Julius Eastman's and Philipp Glass's minimalist etudes, but also Minnie Riperton's eclectic pop design and her early band Rotary Connection are references that can be followed in central pieces such as "Solar" or "Air". .
Heart and Reality, the Morricone-esque epic film soundtrack opus that opens the cycle, go back to 1971, when Isaac Hayes, on his key album Black Moses, engaged in a kind of re-appropriation with the white composer Burt Bacharach and Kris Kristofferson served.
It's also about the liberation of black musical forms of expression from the often attributed genre ghettos of R&B and soul.
The album ends
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"Air" works just as well as a resilience-inspiring neo-classical concert suite as it does as a subversive soundtrack for an imaginary new horror film from Get Out director Jordan Peele.
High above the clouds, in the fresh air she creates with a brazen gesture, the freedom of this mysterious band seems to know no bounds.
(9.0)
Listened briefly:
Let's Eat Grandma – »Two Ribbons«
Like many other pop acts, Let's Eat Grandma has been hit hard by the pandemic.
With their second album »I'm All Ears«, the British duo had opened the ears of critics and audiences alike, their big breakthrough was imminent.
But then came the lockdown - and the friendship between Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth from Norwich, which had existed since kindergarten, before it had been an almost symbiotic network, began to fray in frustration - into lonely individual strands, »two ribbons«.
Against the backdrop of self-confidently glittering dance and synth-pop anthems as well as a few acoustic ballads, the so-titled new album tells a very touching story about the doubts and hurts that mending the relationship and saving the band included - including a magical, instrumental walk through the graveyard ,
because to all the Corona sadness came the tragic deaths of Hollingworth's friend Billy Clayton and producer Sophie.
"I just want to be your best friend, just like it always was," Hollingsworth sings pleadingly in the title track.
Luckily they have reconnected their almost lost thread.
To a new, more mature version (7.6)
Pusha T - »It's Almost Dry«
If this continues, it will soon be official: Kanye West's best albums now come from his GOOD Music label boss Pusha T. The 44-year-old invented his style four years ago with the help of Producer West on the excellent mini-album »Daytona« new, now he brought his old mentor Pharrell Williams back on board for the successor, who once used Pusha T's brother duo Clipse as a playback station for sound experiments by the producer team Neptunes.
The collaboration still sparks, for example in "Brambleton," an amusingly bubbling robber's gun in which Pusha settles accounts with his fraudulent ex-manager and once again proves himself not only to be one of the genre's most precise rap technicians and narrators, but with a nice "The Godfather" reference outed again as a film freak.
The album's highlights, however, once again belong to Kanye West, who used the nostalgic ex-pusher narratives of the self-proclaimed »Cocaine's Dr.
Seuss" refined with exquisite and curious samples, Donny Hathaway's "Jealous Guy" version as well as the seventies rock nugget "Six Day War" by Colonel Bagshot.
Large, elegant gangsta cinema.
(7.5)
Non-Seattle – “Communist libido”
Katharina Kollmann, born in Berlin-Karlshorst in 1985, sings melancholy and plaintively to a lonely guitar about her life as a threadbare that is kicked away by a boot.
It was probably a man, maybe a woman?
"Not a person, but a system," she suspects - and in the song "Freund" she wishes for someone to say to her: "You mustn't ask who that was, but where did you fall?" There are such dialogues with imaginary personnel many on the second non-Seattle album, now released on the Berlin Staatsakt label, after the self-released debut »Wendekid« from 2019. Producer Olaf OPAL (among others The Notwist) smoothed out and ordered its unfinished noise, but left enough room for Kollmann’s mostly slow-motion,
but sometimes also angry, distorted Slowcore spinning through milieu and social studies such as »Communist libido«, »Lady Grau« or »Hochhauslied«.
All of this has less to do with grunge and tocotronic, which of course immediately come to mind when you hear the band name (»We're not in Seattle here, Dirk«), and more to do with the related search for an attitude towards general homelessness, which oscillates between defiance and surrender to fate of the individual in late capitalism.
Oof, yes.
Easier: Kollmann succeeds in creating beautiful, cleverly captioned sketches of the underside of the shoe sole (which, by the way, are amusingly illustrated as a comic in the accompanying songbook by Fania Jacob).
To quote from »Communist Libido«: »The best, just like that.« (7.9)
Of course, one immediately thinks of the band name (»We are not in Seattle, Dirk«), all of this has less to do with the related search for an attitude to the general homelessness of the individual in late capitalism, which oscillates between defiance and surrender to fate.
Oof, yes.
Easier: Kollmann succeeds in creating beautiful, cleverly captioned sketches of the underside of the shoe sole (which, by the way, are amusingly illustrated as a comic in the accompanying songbook by Fania Jacob).
To quote from »Communist Libido«: »The best, just like that.« (7.9)
Of course, one immediately thinks of the band name (»We are not in Seattle, Dirk«), all of this has less to do with the related search for an attitude to the general homelessness of the individual in late capitalism, which oscillates between defiance and surrender to fate.
Oof, yes.
Easier: Kollmann succeeds in creating beautiful, cleverly captioned sketches of the underside of the shoe sole (which, by the way, are amusingly illustrated as a comic in the accompanying songbook by Fania Jacob).
To quote from »Communist Libido«: »The best, just like that.« (7.9)
Kollmann succeeds in creating beautiful, cleverly captioned sketches of the underside of the shoe sole (which, by the way, are amusingly illustrated as a comic in the accompanying songbook by Fania Jacob).
To quote from »Communist Libido«: »The best, just like that.« (7.9)
Kollmann succeeds in creating beautiful, cleverly captioned sketches of the underside of the shoe sole (which, by the way, are amusingly illustrated as a comic in the accompanying songbook by Fania Jacob).
To quote from »Communist Libido«: »The best, just like that.« (7.9)
Kelly Lee Owens - »LP.8«
With the Welsh artist Kelly Lee Owens, you can never be sure whether something completely foreign to the genre is suddenly being quoted, just like Aaliyah or Radiohead on earlier albums.
Her new track "One", great relief, is not a U2 homage, but a kind of mantra in which the singer waits for a certain word that is then not revealed.
Maybe she means "Release", that is, the "release" with which her third (not eighth) album begins technoidly.
More uncompromising than on earlier dance tracks like "Melt!", Owens sets a hard-timed tomograph beat to a hiss and runs an annoyingly repetitive "Release" voice sample over it.
In addition, there is moaning as if it were about sex with machines.
So you can enjoy the electronic Dream and Gltchpop draft of Owens, who already worked with Arca,
Björk and Jon Hopkins worked, of course also reading.
Here she dissolves song structures even more than before, but lingers too long in the middle part of the album, between great, ice-cold bass bangers like "Voices" and "Sonic 8" in the prayer room for esoteric ambiences ("Nana Piano").
Nevertheless, once again a fascinating aural sculpture for which the right word is missing.
(7.3)
