Weekly Music Roundup: Joseph C. Phillips Jr., Dry Cleaning, and Bomba Estéreo

Week of Nov. 23: This week, nostalgia for psychedelic Turkish pop from King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard, a wide-angle view of the Black experience in The Grey Land by Joseph C. Phillips Jr, and a gothic polka about a haunted house.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s Latest Obsession: Turkish House Music

Australian rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are known for wild live shows and for recordings that range from acoustic folk to something approaching heavy metal – all filtered through the band’s casual psychedelic approach. They’re also prolific as hell, and they’ve just released two separate LPs, one called Live in S.F. ’16, and other called K.G. From the latter album comes this catchy, serpentine tune called “Intrasport,” which shows the influence of Turkish house music of the 90s and perhaps the Turkish psychedelic pop of the 70s. Some Turkish music uses scales that are tuned differently from the usual Western major and minor scales, but for this group, that’s no problem: their 2017 album Flying Microtonal Banana (the first of five, yes, five LPs they put out that year) is full of traditional Turkish lutes and reeds and is played largely on microtonal, non-Western scale forms. Accompanying the song is a silly video of the guys pretending, although not very hard, to be in still photos while the camera is running.  

It's Time to Pick Up Some Dry Cleaning

I had never heard of Dry Cleaning until this week, but I am on board now. This quartet from London plays a kind of lean but funky post-punk that sounds more like Manchester in the late 70s than London today, but the main attraction might be vocalist Florence Shaw. Looking back now at their earlier songs, she doesn’t appear to be much of a singer – which is fine, because she doesn’t do much actual singing. What she does is to play with language, dissecting the minutiae of our lives with a scalpel of dry wit and delivering a series of images that are almost startling in their ordinariness. “I've come here to make a ceramic shoe/and I've come to smash what you made,” she intones in the band’s new single. Even the title, “Scratchcard Lanyard,” is a good example of how Shaw can use words for their sound as opposed to their meaning. And the video perfectly complements her deadpan delivery.    

So, things to look forward to in 2021: 1. COVID vaccine; 2. Dry Cleaning’s full-length debut.   

Bomba Estéreo Release Theme Song For Sonic Forest Documentary

As we’ve seen in this space recently, Simon Mejia, the founder of the Colombian electronic dance band Bomba Estéreo, has been working on a solo project called Monte and a documentary film called Sonic Forest, both inspired by the indigenous cultures and the natural beauty of the Colombian countryside. Now the rest of the band has gotten in on the act. Bomba Estéreo has done the theme song for the film, which came out last week. The song “Sonic Forest” features guest vocals by Nidia Gongora, who is a folk singer from Colombia’s Pacific coast.  The song features lots of traditional percussion as well, and the video also serves as a pretty enticing trailer for the documentary. 

The Grey Land Offers A Panoramic View of Race In America

New York composer Joseph C Phillips Jr has led his big band Numinous for many years in mostly instrumental works that draw on Minimalism, big band jazz, funk, rock, and classical music. But on Friday he released a striking new album called The Grey Land which looks at the experience of being Black in America. Phillips does this by focusing in tightly on a single character, a Black mother raising a son, but also by zooming out and taking a wide-angle look at Black America. It’s a serious business – “Don’t” is essentially “The Talk” that many Black parents have to have with their teenage sons (“Don’t dress gangsta/Don’t put your hands in your pockets”); album centerpiece “Ferguson, Summer 2014” is a brilliant but shattering response to the Norman Rockwell vision of America that composer Samuel Barber presented in 1947 in his beautiful “Knoxville, Summer 1914.” But it’s also shot through with moments of humor (“Agnus Bey” refers to Beyoncé) and references to pop culture like the movies Get Out (“The Sunken Place”) and Kill Bill (this piece, called “I Should Have Been Mother____ing Black Mamba!”) In The Grey Land, the band Numinous expands to include 4 guitarists, who help lay down the soul/funk groove that supports an array of shifting styles in this one track. 

Dust Bowl Faeries Present Cabaret Songs For The End Of The World

From the Hudson Valley comes the goth/cabaret band called Dust Bowl Faeries. Led by queer, gender-fluid singer/songwriter Ryder Cooley, the Faeries make frequent use of waltz rhythms, accordions, and the eerie sound of the theremin (the swooping electronic instrument you hear in almost every 1950s sci-fi movie). They also tell stories, and from the title of their new album, The Plague Garden, you can guess what many of their stories are about. But they also play songs where you may not know what they’re about, even after hearing them. “Serpentine Samba” reimagines the mythical Kraken as a belly dancer; “Ibex” appears to be about resurrecting, a la Frankenstein’s monster, an extinct species of European wild goat. This song, “Cyanide Hotel,” is allegedly about a haunted house in Albany. Yes, I suppose it’s scary – Cooley tells us there’s a house on the hill and it’ll make your blood run cold, but meanwhile the whole band is bopping along with a moshpit polka so it’s a little hard to get too worried… 

Liturgy’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix Makes Music That She Would Most Want To Hear

Liturgy’s latest offering is a chamber metal opera record, Origin of the Alimonies; it is a crucible of black metal, minimalism, chamber music, plus avant-glitch effects, and trap beats, anchored by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix as the female protagonist. [According to her Bandcamp page, “The album is also accompanied by a new, eponymous album-length operatic video written, directed, shot, edited by and starring Hunt-Hendrix, who uses her evolving body, in the wake of her recent gender affirmation as a trans woman, as the medium for the story.”] The centerpiece of the record, “Apparition of the Eternal Church,” is an expanded arrangement of Messiaen’s 1932 organ work, which Hunt-Hendrix has pumped full of musical drama, containing bursts of blast beats and ferocious tremolo electric guitars, and the shredded-throat roars that a metal fan might crave; meanwhile the orchestral instruments (harp, strings, flutes, etc.) contribute minimalist holding patterns. Together, all of these elements enter a battle royale of tense progressions, dynamic swells, and repetitive insistent crashings. To be sure, there are many other gorgeous moments on the record (like harp and cello versus the insistent flute and trumpet riff in “SIHEYMN’s Lament,” that could easily give the NOW Ensemble a run for their money, or the delicate, yet explosive conclusion of “The Armistice”) but sonically and emotionally, the core work on the album, “Apparition,” achieves a satisfying balance of the beautifully abrasive and weirdly cathartic. - Caryn Havlik