I like the idea of borrowing from past Satanic panics that didn’t bring down civilization as a way of implying that neither will mere hormones and surgery; hopefully somewhere in Canada there’s a metal band that thinks this is good shit and can match her aggression (“Deviancy”, “You Like My Body the Way It Is”, “Devil in a Moshpit”)
A double album of solo double bass with a title that translates to “Light/Darkness” seems a bit... dualist, but he has more than two ways of sounding delicate when he’s playing notatable melodies, and when he switches to whale impressions, they don’t seem arbitrary (“Trestein”, “Varde”, “Lys”)
Their assonances and drawing-out of words matters at least as much as their meaning, though there’s plenty of meaning as well—sex with witches is good, I can believe (“Umbrellar”, “Smut”, “Cat Scratch”)
Kampala-to-Brighton crew with two nerds cognizant of recent developments in industrial techno and four drummers who just do their thing (“Black Kaveera”, “Gunjula”, “Tewali Sukali”)
Siti Muharam: Siti of Unguja (Romance Revolution on Zanzibar)
Elusive chanteuse Muharam benefits from a crack band and fancy overdubs (dig the bass clarinet on the opener), yet considering how singular her voice is supposed and sometimes appears to be, there sure are a lot of instrumentals (“Sikitiko”, “Pakistan”, “Kijiti”)
Eternal Champion: Ravening Iron
Pulpy fantasy metal that’s not obviously stupid or flagrantly immortal—it’s mostly combatants and Romans who get their skulls cleaved—simulates monumentality through sheer thickness of riffage (“War at the End”, “Skullseeker”, “Ravening Iron”)
Rich Halley: The Shape of Things
Hardly groundbreaking, but Halley blows hardly on tenor, while Matthew Shipp and his trio imbue the geometric titles with Euclidean rigor (“The Curved Horizon”, “Tetrahedron”)
Scandijazz quintet album I like two-thirds of the time, and no, the one-third doesn’t directly correspond to the vibraphone solos—more to the times they prioritize mushrooms over bashing, however ecological that may be (“Bashing Mushrooms”, “Horus Oye”)
Juice WRLD: Goodbye and Good Riddance
A very teenage boy debut, with all the lack of perspective that implies, yet there’s a newness to it, as well as a self-awareness (“cliché, I do it anyway”) that suggests a real desire to move beyond his limitations (“Armed and Dangerous”, “All Girls Are the Same”)
A return to form by which I mean structure, plus they remembered the “metal” part of doom metal this time (“Forgotten Days”, “Rite of Passage”)
“Mauerpark liquid jazz,” as Alan Partridge calls it in the presskit, means treated sax and clarinet, complicated by electronics and sometimes breakbeats—unique, though I’d rather Sandsjö just show he has a mouth like a traction engine (“Abysmal”, “Oisters”)
Tony Allen & Hugh Masekela: Rejoice
A minor record featuring these two still provides value: Allen gets a few good grooves out of the slightly overmatched band, and Masekela’s vocal tribute to Fela is roughly effective (“Coconut Jam”, “Slow Bones”)
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R&RHoF picks: Jay-Z, Turner, Fela, Bush, Dolls. Next week: Djibouti, why is you here?