Another bookmark I’ve placed on my journey through 80s albums, Nyssa Musique appeared on my radar after seeing many trusted sources hype this record up as something special. While it may not be mind-blowing, their one record Comme Au Moulin is a fantastic record in the canon of weirdo jazz, “non-western” rhythms + textures and modern minimal composition.
One of the magic motifs that occur when you’re constantly ingesting new music is that sometimes you’ll listen to an unassuming record once and find it pleasant enough to listen to again at a later date. Once the later date arrives you find it even better than the last time you listened, and the time in between corresponding listens becomes shorter and shorter. Are you following? This happened to me with the 2021 You’ll Never Get To Heaven album, Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train, a record I was not anticipating in any way and happened to check out on a whim, only to get lost in its tender limbs and cloudy atmosphere.
Alabaster dePlume, aka Gus Fairbairn, is releasing a fantastic double album GOLD – Go Forward In The Courage Of Your Love on April 1 via International Anthem, following his healing 2020 LP For Cy & Lee, which I woefully lacked coverage of at the time but trust me, I listened! It’s great! This new music is great too!
Another gem in my unending search for the great albums of the 80s, I came across the music of Fairuz, which was new to me but widely regarded as one of, if not the greatest, singer in the Arabic world, even gone so far as to be called “the soul of Lebanon”. The album in question is Maarifti Feek, recorded over four or so years in the 80s, collaborating with her son to create a more modern take on traditional Lebanese and Arabic song structures, themes and motifs. What resulted is a funky, lavish and touching record that every music lover should listen to.
Folk fans – perk thine ears, for a enlightened presence this way comes! NY-based singer/songwriter Allegra Krieger is releasing her new album Precious Thing on March 4 via Northern Spy, her second for the label. Recorded with Luke Temple of Here We Go Magic + Art Feynman, Krieger taps into deep layers of personal dilemmas that we all encounter in our lives, pulling strings of wisdom out of each, and knitting gorgeous tapestries of thought & introspection.
Honestly not sure how I came across this record. It just floated into my life one day. That method of discovery is pretty appropriate for how the music sounds, so I’m not mad about it. Starland is the debut album of Brooklyn-based artist Claire Dickson, who created the album in her apartment and at sea in the Arctic circle on a college project. The resulting LP is a shifting, uncanny deconstruction of pop and jazz tropes, scattered across an open, frigid sky. It’s got a co-sign from Vijay Iyer, so I think it’s legit.
As you may have read in earlier posts on the blog, I’ve been methodically going through albums of the 80s that I haven’t listened to before. This has included many, MANY classics that I just overlooked due to sheet exposure (I’ve seen this listed so many times, there’s no way I need to listen) or ignorance; along with things I’ve dug up to find, including weirdo private press grooves, hailed LPs from “non-western” markets, or deeper discography dives that aren’t featured in as many decade-encapsulating retrospectives.
Siouxsie & the Banshees’ Peepshow was one of the very latter types of records I’ve been listening to for the first time. In fact, and very embarrassingly, I hadn’t listened to Siouxsie’s Juju before I started this project. For shame! But I enjoyed it so much that I started to pay attention to other releases of theirs. My first I bit into was Peepshow, Siouxsies’ 1988 album that embraced more art rock a la Kate Bush, while still showcasing her fierce songwriting and vocal chops.
Anyone looking for some new, aerobic, quivering pop a la FKA twigs’ debut LP are in luck! This new song “Optimist” from singer/songwriter Chelsea Jade, whose sophomore album Soft Spot is coming April 29 via Carpark, instantly brought me back to LP1 with a modern R&B twist.
Boy Harsher made a movie! The unmistakable dark synth duo Boy Harsher continue to build up cred as the coolest band in the biz by releasing a horror movie, The Runner, which is now streaming on Shudder (which also features Kris Esfandiari of King Woman as the lead)! They of course also made the soundtrack, which features some slick new tunes similar to those we all know and love them for, but also deepens their catalog with rare moments of purely instrumental introspection, major chord progressions and guest vocal features. Chromatics could never.
