Category: Music

Album Review: Fleet Foxes – Shore

by Liam Inscoe - Jones, posted in Music, Music Reviews

In the week before the autumn equinox of this strange year, I was in the small fishing town of Beer in Devon, England, spending the first week with my family and away from stagnant city air since lockdown began in March. I was born in the Midlands, with a hundred miles of industrial towns between us and the sea to the east and the entire country of Wales to the west: in Beer I was reminded of the enigma of a sea I was used to seeing rarely; the oddity of nothing on horizon, the refreshing crispness of sea-salt and offensive crispness of the wind. The waves of an encroaching tide don’t ever lose their novelty; we spent each evening watching the cusped hands of the sea fold the pebbled beach back over itself. (Also, most of the pubs were shut).

It’s a shame that the Fleet Foxes missed me by one week; it would have been perfect to hear their fourth album there, rather than lying in Clissold Park in central London with an accidentally-purchased alcohol-free beer and the sight of some teens nicking a park-keeper’s buggy for accompaniment. The music took me back to the water regardless. Titled Shore, and with a gorgeous photograph by Hrisohi Hamaya as it’s cover, it’s an album which sort of shimmers – like the sea when the sun hits it just right – propelled by waves of intricate instrumentation and pockmarked by birdsong and a kind of delicate tonality indebted to Phillip Glass.

Eschewing the arbitrary industry-standard Friday release-date, the album was dropped on Tuesday September 22nd, the day of the autumn equinox, and it’s easy to see why: Shore is refreshing in a way not unlike the new season. While 2017’s Crack-Up was a literary and often-beautiful release, it was a complicated listen by design, and that is not the case for Shore. With four more songs but exactly the same run-time, this collection is direct, the vast scope of the previous release traded in for a set of sharp songs, written solely by Pecknold before and during the pandemic. The album is bright and colourful, with sweetness brought by moments like the Laurie Anderson-aping scales which open “Jara”, or the dainty organ which dances around “Featherweight”.

The other contributor to the album’s freshness comes from a theme of humility which runs through the music. The band was once home to folk-rock’s most entertaining narcissist, but Pecknold takes a different tact: opening song “Wading In Waist-High Water” is sung entirely by Uwade Akhere, a 19 year old student from Oxford who Pecknold discovered when she posted a cover of one of his songs to YouTube. The second song “Sunblind” is dedicated entirely to his influences, describing the liberating feeling of accepting your work to be eternally in the shadow of your heroes: “And in your rarified air I feel sunblind / I’m looking up at you there high in my mind / Only way that I made it for a long time / But I’m loud and alive, singing you all night”. Indeed Pecknold claims to have only been able to make the album by making playlists filled with Arthur Russell, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Michael Nau, Van Morrison, Sam Cooke, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and more and simply bathing in them, learning from their use of simplicity and warmth. You can certainly hear Sam Cooke in the sweet melancholy of “A Long Way Past The Past”, and you can literally hear Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys’ voice on “Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman”, a sample from behind the boards of Pet Sounds.

With these nerdy little references to music history and song titles Pecknold himself admits he isn’t clear on, the Fleet Foxes’ music retains an air of sophistication. For those of us of a certain age, the sound of orchestral, acoustic guitar-thrashing folk acts like Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers became commonplace, so these songs are timely reminders that, although Fleet Foxes deploy a similar sound, they are the opposite of conservative. Paying homage to the propulsive funk of Stevie Wonder with the staples of 70s folk on “Maestranza” is actually pretty weird, as is the climax of “Quiet Air / Gioia”, a shapeshifting climate-change rager which sees Pecknold hollering call and response vocals decrying “oh devil walk by / I never wanna die, I never wanna die” over some lolloping scales in a way which sounds more like The Knife than Crosby, Stills & Nash, or whoever.

Even though these songs are more direct than their predecessors, it’s hard to call fans who have called this clearer direction “too pop-y” anything other than massive hipsters. Despite their melodiousness, Shore’s ear-worms are little vocal inflections and soaring instrumentation, not bar-room choruses. Sometimes the denseness of the recordings are actually too much: but thankfully “For A Week Or Two” and “I’m Not My Season” redress the balance with patient tempos, the latter being perhaps my favourite cut off the record; an elegant and mournful slice of winter poetry which paints depression as a monolithic state, unchanged by sunshine or rain.

Shore then is the sort of decluttering which can feel anti-climatic in the wake of Crack-Up’s complexities, but the approach is a necessary one. Marvin Gaye followed the densely political What’s Going On with the simply horny Let’s Get It On, and Kendrick Lamar released the hit-yielding DAMN in the wake of To Pimp A Butterfly. Sometimes, when you release a 75 minute jazz epic tied together by performance poetry, there’s really nowhere else to go. Shore certainly seems to be a similar response to the ornate and elusive Crack-Up, with Pecknold even commenting on the physical toll of crafting such a dense work: “living for that long inside Crack-Up’s dense compositions, and touring that relentlessly, left me in a quandary: I didn’t want to take another long break from music… but I needed to find a new, brighter way of making songs if I was going to go straight into something large and ambitious again”.

By releasing on the equinox, the Fleet Foxes owned their lane in a way more bands should. Much is made of the band being ‘autumnal’, but it’s normally take as given without much rumination on what that actually means. For me it’s about balance: Pecknold’s powerful voice lends a touch of melancholy to bright instrumentals which make a rock band sound like an orchestra, and likewise autumn is a in-between period in our planet’s slingshot around the sun. It helps that their last two albums were about transitions too: Helplessness Blues was a classic of the genre in fact – about the shift from adolescence into adulthood – and Crack-Up was about finding footing in this new state of being. Shore is about arrival. Its songs are bold, bright and direct: gone is the tentativeness of their third album’s reticent moments of tense quiet and lyrically, Pecknold seems to have found a firm sense of direction here: stood facing the sea, looking out.

Liam Inscoe – Jones

Album Review: Maze and Lindholm – A River Flowing Home to the Sea

by Liam Inscoe - Jones, posted in Music, Music Reviews

It’s hard to comprehend that one of the creators of this patient and meditative release is also half of the bombastic noise and techno duo Orphan Swords, but that’s who P.Maze is; working for the second time with Brussels-based composer and double-bass player Otto Lindholm. Together they  released 2018’s Where The Wolf Has Been Seen, an enigmatic record torn between ambience and urban anxiety. 

The sounds of that LP evoked the city, and it’s no surprise, recorded as it was in a 12 meter-square room in the middle of one, and likewise their second album reflects where it too was made, in the an “old house in the countryside… with a large window overlooking the trees”. The resultant music peruses just half of the Where The Wolf…’s multitudes, committing itself to slowly unravelling ambience completely…  Continue reading “Album Review: Maze and Lindholm – A River Flowing Home to the Sea” →

50 Songs for the Black Lives Matter Movement

by Liam Inscoe - Jones, posted in Features, Music, Politics

This week I wrote about the gratitude I feel for having received such an education on systemic racism in America and the UK simply through to having an interest in music. Exploring new music as a teenager, I sought out the songs rather than the political and emotional understanding yet gained both at the same time, and now I would like to return the favour to those who are coming at things from the opposite perspective: abruptly awakened to the state of race relations in modern America and seeking to expand the depth of their understanding. Alongside myriad feature films, documentaries and books (fictional and academic), I believe one of the finest ways to do so is by exploring eighty years of black music from America and the UK.

Let’s not beat around the bush: black people invented popular music. From blues to jazz, from rock ‘n’ roll to rap, from disco to house, from soul to R&B: myriad white musicians have released fantastic music in what is ultimately a black form. It’s no coincidence; when black people in America couldn’t express themselves at the ballot box, they could express themselves in song. This is a playlist of fifty songs from across the past eighty years of African American musicianship. Many of them are well known, some have been overlooked or are simply too old to be remembered by most. They’re largely listed in chronological order with some exceptions, and are mostly American with a handful of songs from the UK.

Jim Crow Blues – Lead Belly

Recorded sometime in the 1930s, this song by blues icon Lead Belly – a man born on a plantation on 1888 – is a small window into the life of African Americans in the first half of the 20th Century; a response to the segregationist laws enforced until 1965 in the Southern United States. Jim Crow laws made black American’s second class citizens in their own country, forcing segregation in all public services and removing the few political and economic gains made by African Americans in the wake of the abolition of slavery in 1865. Hullie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter urges in his rumbling baritone to “get together, break up this old Jim Crow”, and the reference to Bunk Johnson, a jazz trumpeter from New Orleans, is testament to the unifying power of song for a uniquely disenfranchised population.

Black, Brown & Beige Part IV (Aka ‘Come Sunday’) – Duke Ellington & His Orchestra Featuring Mahalia Jackson

The pioneering pianist and composer’s Black, Brown & Beige suite debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1943. Ellington’s most ambitious symphony was introduced as “a parallel to the history of the Negro in America” and contained three titular movements, with each part broken into different periods of African American history; from the 700 Haitians who came to the aid of African Americans during the Revolutionary War to the influence of West Indians, the emancipation and the contemporary Blues period. The enchanting vocals of Mahalia Jackson – who later performed at the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s funeral – elevate this portion of the music, which went on to become a traditional spiritual on its own terms. It captures the healing power of Christianity for many disenfranchised African Americans, including Ellington’s own faith. William McClain has noted the importance of Sunday to black Americans, even in secular music: “To the Christian, Sunday is, or should be, another Easter, in which God’s victory in Christ over sin and death are celebrated in work, word, song, prayer, and preaching. After all, even [slave] masters and owners tried to be more human on Sunday”.

Fables of Faubus – Charles Mingus

Written in 1959 in direct reaction to the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus – who sent out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine black teenagers – “Fables of Faubus” is the both one of bassist and jazz composer Charles Mingus’ most strikingly political songs, and testament to sweeping censorship enacted by white label bosses against their black musicians. Columbia Records refused to include the lyrics Mingus wrote for the song, forcing the classic album Mingus Ah Um to be released with only the instrumental version included. When the version of the song featuring call-and-response vocals by Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond was finally released, it became apparent what the label bosses were so scared of: “Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie / Governor Faubus! / Why is he so sick and ridiculous? / He won’t permit integrated schools / Then he’s a fool! Nazi fascist supremists!” They may have been silenced, but they weren’t wrong.

Strange Fruit – Nina Simone

Recorded originally in 1939 by Billie Holliday, this haunting ballad compares lynched African Americans to fruit on a tree, and in doing so declared war against the perpetrators of these pubic executions, and in effect began the civil rights movement in earnest. The words were written by Abel Meerpol, in reaction to the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Equally iconic is Nina Simone’s cover of the song, released on her 1965 album Pastel Blues in the midst of the same movement. Simone’s incredible barritone gives the song the same twisted darkness of it’s subject matter, the moment when the instrumental falls to silence as Simone howls the line “strange and bitter crop” surely being one of the most shocking in modern music.

A Change Is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke

Blessed both with one of the finest voices of the original soul era and soaring string orchestration, “A Change Is Gonna Come” became emblematic of the entire Civil Rights era, taking all the nuance and division of the first post-war movement for the fight for equitable rights of black Americans and placing them in their plainest and most hopeful terms: “there have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long / But now I think I’m able to carry on / It’s been a long, a long time coming / But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will”. Upon the election of the first black President, Barack Obama, in 2008, the song was played widely in the nation’s capital, however the failings of the President to create the manner of society Cooke sung of over half a century earlier show the extent to which racism is ingrained in every American system and institution.

sam-cooke---bw-sony-

Continue reading “50 Songs for the Black Lives Matter Movement” →

“How It Feels To Be Free”: Learning About Race Through Music

by Liam Inscoe - Jones, posted in Features, Music, Politics

Like the Star Trek geek and the stamp collector, I’m often self-conscious about my obsession with music. I know that I’m far from the only one. Music is surely the most popular medium art comes in, and even though I know friends who could barely name a song, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t listen to music ever. But for me it’s most of what I do. I get bored attempting almost any task without it, it’s all I write about, read about, listen to podcasts about, and most of what I post on social media is about music. At times it leaves me worried; worried about looking like a hipster, worried about being a snob and nervous about the thought of boring people by ranting on about something I truly feel would improve their lives in the way the music I love enriches mine.

But then at a time like this – in the midst of a genuine historical reckoning – I’m also very grateful. While some white people were hearing Rodney King’s name for the first time, and becoming newly incensed at injustices perpetrated by systems of authority in America and worldwide now impossible to ignore, I found myself feeling bizarrely familiar with a struggle which has in fact been raging for decades, to which I have no physical connection. I was aware of the history of oppression lasting long past slavery and Jim Crow; in the prison-industrial complex, the war on drugs, racial profiling and economic disenfranchisement up until this very day. For a white 24 year old from rural Shropshire, who went to a Grammar school and studied nothing but a few very cursory lessons on the Civil Rights movement in class – told through a passivising, reductive lens no less – it made no sense. I’ve come to realise that it was all thanks to the music.

I had an unusually good foundation for avoiding ignorance, being born in Wolverhampton – one of the most racially diverse cities in the UK – and my father being an anti-racist campaigner as far back at the late 1960s – but I still came to much of this learning accidentally. One of the first African American pieces of music I sought out was Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”, after hearing it at the end of an episode of the BBC drama Life On Mars when I was a kid. I fell in love with her music, and by extension 1960s and 70s soul, and as a result I eagerly consumed “What Happened, Miss Simone?”, Liz Garbus’ phenomenal documentary on the singer’s life, when it arrived on Netflix in 2015.

Simone was one of the most talented performers in modern American history but it’s impossible to watch the documentary about her life without being made incredibly aware of how race impacted upon every aspect of it. She was one of the most proficient classical pianists in the country, and yet was still rejected from the Curtis Institute of Music. She became involved in the Black Panther movement, and it almost cost her her career. I only watched to discover more about her music, but I learnt so much more. 

My interest in music grew exponentially, and likewise you can’t become a fan of Marvin Gaye and A Tribe Called Quest without being aware of police brutality in the inner-cities of America, listen to Archie Shepp and Nina Simone and remain ignorant to the worst violence and murders perpetrated against black citizens in the 1960s or listen to Run The Jewels and Erykah Badu and be blind to the incarceration rates which recreate slavery still, in 21st century America.

I will never understand what it’s like to be somebody living on the receiving end of these systems of ingrained and explicit prejudice and oppression, but I am grateful that by happenstance I fell in love with an art-form which can help me learn about the historical precedents and political forces which inform African American music. It is also one of the most rewarding lessons a person can receive: learning about painful injustice through songs which are emotionally charged, brave, pioneering, liberating and fun.

In a year when many people are approaching from the other side – looking to understand systemic racism in a way our schools and our circles fail to do – I would like to share some of the music and musicians I have encountered over the course of ten years of listening to music fanatically: 50 Songs For The Black Lives Matter Movement, stretching from Lead Belly in the 1930s to Run The Jewels fourth album, released last week. It is available on Spotify and Apple Music, and it comes with a companion article with in-depth analysis of all fifty songs exploring the musicians behind them and their historical and political context. I hope that it helps those looking to learn more about race-relations in America do so, and shines a light on some overlooked or undiscovered African American musicians which people can also fall in love with, enriching their lives more ways than one.

The playlist:

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Apple Music Link

A MASTER DOCUMENT OF SOURCES PERTAINING TO THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT CAN BE FOUND HERE. Including equational resources, charitable causes, advice to protestors and much more. I have chosen to donate to Black Lives Matter UK and the Bail Project in the US. 

Words by Liam Inscoe – Jones.

Album Review: Westerman – Your Hero Is Not Dead

by Liam Inscoe - Jones, posted in Music, Music Reviews

Some styles are harder to succeed in than others; virtuosity, sweeping conceptuality; these are hard to master because they demand skills which are almost unobtainable. The laidback, silver New Wave of 26 year old Londoner Will Westerman’s sound is hardly revolutionary: but his chosen style comes with its own set of dilemmas. There are hints of Peter Gabriel, 10cc and Beach House to a washed-out style which has captured hundred bedroom outfits over the past decade, and it’s precisely this saturated market which makes Westerman’s debut so satisfying. Stare through a dozen supporting acts of cardigan wearing, feet-staring dream-pop bands and it’s easy to forget that this ethereal sound can be enchanting rather than bewitchingly dull, and he strikes that chord immediately. 

The approach of the record is slow and cerebral, but among the sounds Westerman plays with producer Nathan Jenkins are sticky choruses and instrumentation which builds into graceful cacophonies; ornate in construction but relaxed in execution. Westerman’s voice is punctuated by circular guitar playing and filled with 21st century touches in the form of thunderous kick drums, loose hi-hats and looped guitar vamps. Songs like “Big Nothing Glow” are intensely detailed but remain elastic, bathed in shimmering synths and thick reverb which keeps the tracks loose and compelling. There are guitar solos too: lots of them.

YHIND Image Red 1 cred Bex Day

With references to architecture and a bauhaus aesthetic, it’s an album which would have fit in the canon of early 80s British New Wave alongside Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and co., but Westerman’s concerns are very 2020. Lead single “Blue Comanche” is one of the album’s most luscious, but it’s words sting with anxiety over the ever-expanding harm of environmental loss, with references to acorns and cyborgs abound. It’s hard to imagine this single staying far from the top of the singles charts in 1981, boasting a staunch commitment to whirring synths and call-and-repeat vocals. 

Westerman can be emotionally distant – these are erudite songs about grey areas, discourse and modernisation – but they also possess a rare nuance, such as on “The Line”, which wonders aloud where “the line is”. The context is left open – it could refer to political discourse or a row between lovers – but that’s where the poignancy comes from. And somehow the song still slaps: the ear-worm chorus soaring over a fog of synths and sharp guitar licks. Despite their sibylline character, others tracks express concrete affirmation, like the uptempo “Think I’ll Stay”, a reflection on chronic illness which ends with the proclamation: “don’t know how I got here / but now that I am I think I’ll stay”.

This debut album isn’t freewheeling and it isn’t revolutionary, instead it’s a remarkably precocious mastery of a style which has for too long being lost in the fog of it’s own introspection. Will Westerman meets that with directness, precision and a healthy dose of magic. 

Words by Liam Inscoe – Jones.