Weekly Music Roundup: The Decemberists & Gothic Music From the North
This week, a new sound for The Decemberists, and for Allman Brown, plus dark, gothic music from the north, and dystopian synth-pop.
PREMIERE: A First Look At Allman Brown’s New EP
London’s Allman Brown had an online hit with his 2017 song “Sweetest Thing,” which topped 16 million plays on Spotify. Today, he announces the impending release of his next EP, Bury My Heart, due on March 16; and we are premiering the title track. It’s a bit of a different sound for Brown: the soulful vocals, layered in harmony during the chorus, are still there, as is the gentle rhythmic chuck of the guitar; but “Bury My Heart” also has an increasingly lush electronic element. Brown ascribes this to listening to a certain popular Philly rock band: “The War On Drugs was a strong influence,” he says, “in terms of placing subliminal driving percussion alongside rhythmic guitar parts that rise into a larger scale sound than my previous songs.” That sense of scale is important here – the song, he tells us, “is my way of imagining the end of things and what that might feel like.”
Allman Brown will be joining the hordes at South By Southwest in Austin this March; a proper tour is planned for May.
Computer Magic’s Dark New Single
Computer Magic is the nom de disque of singer and producer Danielle “Danz” Johnson. She has taken the DIY aesthetic to its logical conclusion – not only writing and recording her own music but running her own record label (Channel 9), doing all the art work, designing the merchandise, and licensing songs to advertisers like Panasonic and Lexus. Her second album, DANZ, comes out on February 23, but we’ve already had a taste of what’s to come with the recent release of the single “Amnesia,” which used layers of keyboards and programming to create a dance groove. But the mood darkens on the new single, “Delirium (Don’t Follow The Sheep),” which uses a repeating distorted synth riff to evoke a Philip K Dick-style dystopian mood. (The song’s subtitle may remind you of Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, which inspired the movie Blade Runner.)
Computer Magic marks the release of her new album with a set at the Public Hotel on February 23.
A New Sound From The Decemberists
The Decemberists are getting ready to release their eighth studio album, I’ll Be Your Girl, in March. If you are a fan of this band, then you know what to expect: an arty blend of folk-rock, prog rock, brain-teaser lyrics with obscure words, and themes or musical gestures that recur and tie the whole thing together. But here is what you actually get on their new single: a synth-heavy dance number that sounds like Colin Meloy and the gang have been bingeing on old 80s New Order and Depeche Mode records. It’s called “Severed,” and in a press release Meloy describes it as “exuberant nihilism… an apocalyptic dance party was what we envisioned.” While some of the other tracks on the forthcoming record do have a strummy, guitar-based, and recognizably Decemberists sound, parts of I’ll Be Your Girl continue this surprising visit to the world of British glam rock and New Romanticism. It takes a bit of getting used to (for me, about 3.5 seconds), but you’ll have many ways to try – the album is being released in nine different formats, including various limited edition LPs, cassette (why? Why are we doing this again?), and a mystery “Exploded Version,” details to be released shortly.
I’ll Be Your Girl comes out on March 16. The Decemberists will play Celebrate Brooklyn on June 13.
Anna Von Hausswolff’s New Song Is NOT For Bedtime
Swedish singer and composer Anna von Hausswolff makes dark and unsettling music. It’s often quite beautiful, and often based on the sounds of a church organ, which gives things both a heavenly and a gothic cast. But it is not comfortable, and her new single and video, “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra,” is as enigmatic and ominous as anything she’s done. It’s from her forthcoming album Dead Magic, and features von Hausswolff’s keening, swooping vocals and a relentless, pounding guitar chord that never loosens its grip, no matter what else may be happening around it. There is more than a hint of doom metal here, as well as echoes of avant-garde singers like Diamanda Galas, or Meredith Monk in a mad mood. The video, by her sister Maria (both daughters of the highly controversial Swedish artist and sometime musician Carl Michael von Hausswolff), is dreadful – not in the sense of being bad, but literally being full of dread. Again, it’s not comfortable – but it is compelling.
Femi Kuti’s New Video Filmed At Afrobeat’s Home
When Femi Kuti’s father, the late Fela Kuti, was at the height of his fame, he created a kind of concert venue/communal center called The Shrine in the Nigerian capital of Lagos. There his band would play his horn-heavy, deeply-grooved, politically agitated songs. In recent years, his son Femi has re-created the Shrine, and that’s where the video for his song “One People One World” was filmed. It’s an appropriate venue for Femi’s band, closely modeled on Fela’s own. The song is a lot more uptempo, and the lyrics more hopeful and plainspoken, than most of his father’s music, but just listen to those horns…
Lucy Dacus: Songwriter And Director
Lucy Dacus makes songs that full of longing and determination – a duality reflected in the sounds of her band. Soft strumming on acoustic guitars often gets shunted to the side by walls of electric guitar distortion (as in her song “Night Shift,” the first single from her upcoming sophomore album). On her new single, “Addictions,” the guitars come in waves, building through the verses and crashing into the choruses, where they meet some judiciously placed horns. Meanwhile, Dacus ponders the difficulties of dealing with a relationship that may or may not be over. “I’m just calling ‘cause I’m used to it/you pick up ‘cause you’re not a quitter,” she sings. She also directed the video for the song, shot in and around her hometown of Richmond, VA. A simple but remarkably effective device turns this into a story of another duality – the real world and a fantasy world with overtones of the past…
The album, Historian, comes out on March 2. That evening, Lucy Dacus plays in NY at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.
