Loud And Quiet

Obaro Ejimiwe aka Ghostpoet has always maintained that he’s not a rapper, despite everyone calling him one.

The mood of new single ‘Immigrant Boogie’ proves further that he really isn’t, and that it’s hard to pin any one style on this London artist last seen in 2015, when his third album, ‘Shedding Skin’, won him a second Mercury Prize nomination.

The murky ‘Immigrant Boogie’ is kind of hunched to a post-punk pulse that matches its theme of a refugee’s dangerous struggle as they travel across borders. It features Charlie Steen of south London band Shame on backing vocal’s, too.

Ejimiwe says of the tracks

“It’s a first person account of a difficult journey across borders, partly intended to ask those who have questioned the arrival of refugees in recent times what they would do in the same situation.

The song is written in two halves – the first hopeful for a brighter future, while the second sees hope snatched away by forces beyond the control of the storyteller.

There is an important story to be told there, but I wrote the song in a way that aims to capture a broader human truth: that while we are all working for a better life for ourselves, we have to accept that we are not in control of the outcome”

Ghostpoet has also announce the following live dates this autumn:

October:

24th    DUBLIN – Button Factory
25th    LIVERPOOL – Invisible Wind Factory
26th    NEWCASTLE – Riverside
28th    GLASGOW – Stereo
29th    SHEFFIELD – Plug
30th    LEEDS – Brudenell Social Club
31st    BIRMINGHAM – Mama Rouxs

November:

2nd     CAMBRIDGE – Junction
3rd      OXFORD – Academy 2
4th      DOVER – The Booking Hall
6th      LEICESTER – Academy 3
7th      NOTTINGHAM – Rescue Rooms
8th      BRIGHTON – Concorde 2
10th    LONDON – Printworks
11th    MANCHESTER – Academy 2
12th    NORWICH – Arts Centre
13th    PORTSMOUTH – Wedgewood Rooms
14th    BRISTOL – Marble Factory

Chris Nordahl is vocalist with Austin punks US Weekly. We’ll let him explain about the new track the band have just shared:

“‘New Obsessions’ details experiences had by women I know, and many others I don’t. Lyrically the song follows the moments after leaving a dance club when a predatory manchild who can’t take a hint follows you home. The song has a metaphorical double edge, with a man standing in for technology that refuses to offer reprieve from attention bating catcalls, as you’re bombarded by tweets, DMs, and comments from a person who makes you uncomfortable, or even frightened.

“While recording, the simple act of letting the tape run took this song from its originally compact 2-3 minutes into a sprawling noise-psych jam. Upon hearing the result of the lengthy improvised outro, we pulled out every pedal and piece of percussion we could find in the studio and added continuous layers, going down a kraut-rock drain pipe which resulted in our most free form piece of music yet.”

So here it is…

US Weekly’s new self-titled album coming out via the Night Moves label on 21 April. Here are some more details.

Joannah Jackson is a 24-year-old artist from Sydney, Australia. She’s spent 6 years writing her own material, recording it at home on her laptop and making her own DIY videos.

Now she’s releasing music as Sloan Peterson, and she’s readied her debut single, the infectious ‘105’.

The video is shot at The Strand Arcade – the Victorian-style shopping streets in Sydney’s central business district. You’ll likely recognise it from parts of David Bowie’s 1983 video for ‘Let’s Dance’.

In it, Sloan performs along with dancers previously from the Australian Ballet School and Sydney Dance Company.

It’s a promising start for an artist whose already spent a decent amount of time in Sydney’s evergreen DIY garage-rock scene.

Sloan Peterson will release her self-titled debut EP on 14 July on Mirror Records.

When the sun used to come out in 2011, we’d put on ‘Everything Is Dancing’ by London ‘tropical punk’ trio Fair Ohs – a group who’d grown bored of thrashing in hardcore bands and realised that playing Paul Simon and African highlife was a bit more fun.

After their second album (‘Jungle Cats’ in 2013) they quietly wound down the band and have slowly become Pure Beauty. There was no bust up – in fact Pure Beauty isn’t even from the ashes of Fair Ohs: it’s the same three guys, plus saxophonist Sam Ayres, who’d joined the band by the time they hit their second album. It’s just that now they’re playing jazz funk fusion, again through the prism of guys who grew up in DIY punk bands… and maybe once had obsessions with early Red Hot Chili Peppers.

They’ve just posted a new pay-what-you-want 6-track EP on their bandcamp page. It’s good for the sunshine too.

The St. Pierre Snake Invasion sound about as petrifying as the event that inspired their name. It remains one of the worst volcano disasters ever recorded, when, in 1902, Mount Pelée on the island of St. Pierre, Martinique, erupted. Before the deadly explosion killed 30,000 people on the West Indian island, it drove wildlife into the local towns, including an army of giant man-eating snakes.

Bristol’s The St. Pierre Snake Invasion have been making thunderous noise for a couple of years now, and released their debut album ‘A Hundred Years A Day’ in 2015.

As they work on the follow up to that – they’re hoping to have it out this Autumn – they’ve recorded a pair of new tracks for the Too Pure Singles Club, to be released next month.

You can hear the first of the double A-side below. It’s called ‘Dick E Mozart’.

The track will be released, along with flip-side ‘Appendages’, on 26 May. The Too Pure site has all the information you need.

Those who haven’t kept up might think that since he called time on The Streets in 2011 Mike Skinner’s wound things down on the music front.

Quite the opposite. Late last year, Skinner was a guest on our podcast series Midnight Chats. He talked about his many projects, including his regular Tonga club nights he does with Merkage Dave, which ping around Europe and occasionally send Skinner to Los Angeles. He also DJs under his own name, has a new(ish) label called Mike Skinner Ltd., and was the guy responsible for scoring The Inbetweeners Movie.

Since winding up with the fifth and final Streets LP in 2011 he’s made music with Tonga Balloon Gang, too, and The D.O.T (with Rob Harvey from The Music), but his latest project is just Skinner. Working under the title of The Darker the Shadow, The Brighter the Light, he put out a couple of tracks on Soundcloud in 2016, but just now has shared this new one called ‘Bad Decisions In The Night’, for the first time on Spotify.

The instrumentation’s got a Massive Attack ‘Teardrop’ feel to it, while the mood is suitably understated for a man who doesn’t feel he needs to make a song and dance about himself these days.

At the beginning of this year King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard came up with a exhausting-sounding plan. Not only would they release a new album, they’d put out no fewer than five of them. As cool as the idea sounds, the first one ‘Flying Microtonal Banana’ was solid opening but very much sounded like what you’d expect from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

The challenge, I suppose, is that even the most dedicated of KG&LW fans might be stretched by the thought of 5+ hours of new music from the Australian band this year, so will it all sound the same?

Now, continuing the theme of superb album titles, they’ve revealed that number II in this quinlogy (?) of new releases. It’s called ‘Murder Of The Universe’ and will be out on 23 June. They’ve shared a minute of music from it, and, well, it features some spoken word…

Early on last year, Poliça released their excellent third album ‘United Crushers’.

Lyrically, it was an album that quietly but directly addressed social injustice, war, celebrity and what it’s like to live in trigger-happy, modern America. It didn’t take long for it’s resonance to grow in strength.

The calendar looks somewhat quieter for Poliça this year, but they’ve popped up with a pair of new tracks, their first since that album, released via Memphis Industries for Record Store Day on 22 April.

There’s ‘Lipstick Stains’, produced by Boys Noize.

And there’s our favourite of the two, ‘Still Counts’, which features Spank Rock. Channy Leaneagh has this to say about it: “Spank Rock is a rare lyrical gem and true musical artist of the damn finest quality.”

Father John Misty‘s ‘Pure Comedy’ is an album that takes some unraveling. Our review goes some way in trying to do that.

It’s released today (7 April) – it’s in the shops, on the normal streaming services, but Josh Tillman’s US label Sub Pop have also posted it on YouTube. That’s all of it, the whole 1 hour 14 minutes and 25 seconds of strangely enjoyable end of days ballads.

So, here it is.