A CERTAIN RATIO
It All Comes Down To This
MUTE
7/10
Former Factory workers still finding fresh flavours of modernist funk-punk
Enjoying a fertile late-career creative streak despite backstage health issues, former Factory Records stalwarts ACR are stripped down to just the core remaining co-founder trio of Jez Kerr, Donald Johnson and Martin Moscrop here. The band’s first full-length project with prolific writer-producer Dan Carey (Kylie, Kae Tempest, Wet Leg) mostly stays within familiar punk-funk parameters, but is generally an infectiously kinetic, richly detailed, timeless affair. “Estate Kings” pays affectionate spoken-word tribute to the M23 postcode, notably the grand social housing schemes of Wythenshawe, while sunny groove-pop reverie “God Knows” could almost be some great lost collaboration between Haircut 100 and Neu!. Still sounding fresh, almost 50 years later.
STEPHEN DALTON
AMEN DUNES
Death Jokes
SUB POP
7/10
Overstimulating opus from New York psych-folk auteur
Densely layered with samples and cryptic thoughts about life and loss, Death Jokes is a complex record from an artist who’s always had a slippery relationship with pop music. With a braying, often indecipherable vocal delivery best suited for wordless chants, Damon McMahon hit a pop breakthrough on 2018’s Freedom, where glittery electronic production showcased his strong melodies and latent dance influence. On his long awaited follow-up, he pushes himself to channel that same momentum alongside his most psychedelic compositions yet. At its best, like the gorgeous, nine-minute “Round The World”, his bittersweet sound feels like the work of an art-music auteur.
SAM SODOMSKY
KEE AVIL
Spine
CONSTELLATION
7/10
“Raw and bony” art-rock from Montreal underground auteur
Kee Avil describes the sounds we hear on Spine as folk music, which very much makes you wonder what kind of folk she’s hanging out with. Her second album, following close on the heels of 2022’s Crease, is simultaneously deeply intimate and intensely unsettling. Right up front is Avil’s voice, quiet and hushed like a soft whisper in your ear. But the music she brings to bear on “Felt” and “Fading” is visceral and deconstructed: a tangle of brittle guitar, creaking electronics and shrill strokes of violin that altogether has a somewhat biological quality, like an alien lifeform flexing its mandibles.
LOUIS PATTISON
BAB L’BLUZ
Swaken
REAL WORLD
7/10
Franco-Moroccan quartet’s fiery and exultant second
The title refers to possession by a spirit or transcendence in Darija, the Moroccan-Arabic dialect of singer Yousra Mansour. It’s an apt summary of Bab L’Bluz’s sound, which fuses traditional Moroccan folk music with a strong, rhythmic drive – that of the Amazigh, Gnawa, Hassani and Houara peoples – to psych-blues, rock and funk in songs that address local socio-political issues. Swaken is heavier than their 2020 debut and sees all four playing a vast array of instruments, from the bendir (percussion) to zorna (woodwind); it’s also more varied, as standouts “AmmA”, whose whirling intensity Jaz Coleman might well applaud, the sweetly twangling, gently hypnotic “Hezalli” and punchy desert-blues of “Li Maana” attest.
SHARON O’CONNELL
BIG|BRAVE
A Chaos Of Flowers
THRILL JOCKEY
9/10
Montreal experimental rock three-piece continue to maximise their impact
While Montreal’s Big|Brave have amassed a formidably dense and sometimes ferocious back catalogue over the last decade for Southern Lord and Thrill Jockey, their more recent albums highlight quieter means of making an impact. Bearing more of the Appalachian folk influence that came to the form on 2023’s Nature Morte, the band’s seventh album attains a spellbinding balance of heavy and light, the songs’ bruising elements of drone and doom metal continually ceding space to Robin Wattie’s keening voice and expressions of resilience and defiance. Like Low at their most expansive, the music here swells, surges and rages without ever losing the vulnerability at its core.
JASON ANDERSON
BLITZEN TRAPPER
100s Of 1000s, Millions Of Billions
YEP ROC
7/10
Further trippy sunshine from Oregonian country-rockers
It has been historically prudent to be wary of groups from the West Coast of the US expounding on their explorations of eastern philosophy. Blitzen Trapper (and perhaps appropriately, past lives figured in the writing inasmuch as Earley sought inspiration in long-lost demos of songs he’d written as much a younger man). However, Blitzen Trapper are as adept as ever with their characteristic deadpan lyrical warmth and casually ecstatic harmonies: on the likes of “Ain’t Got Time To Fight” and “Planetarium”, they’re like a significantly less unbearable Eagles.
