ESSENTIAL RELEASES This Week’s Essential Releases: Experimental R&B, Post-Punk, Metal, & More By Bandcamp Daily Staff · June 08, 2018

Welcome to Seven Essential Releases, our weekly roundup of the best music on Bandcamp. Each week, we’ll recommend six new albums that were released between last Friday and this Friday, plus pick an older LP from the stacks that you may have missed.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Adrian Younge
The Midnight Hour

Merch for this release:
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)

Five songs into The Midnight Hour, the exceptional new album from producers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, we hear the disembodied voice of R&B icon Luther Vandross (who died in 2005). He’s singing his 1986 hit, “So Amazing,” yet the music behind him is far different than the Quiet Storm soul of the original. Thanks to Muhammad, Younge and their orchestra, “So Amazing” becomes a bossa nova cut—carried by stampeding drums, rising strings and twinkling keys. That’s the magic of The Midnight Hour: No matter the feature, whether it’s Raphael Saadiq on “It’s You,” Cee-Lo Green on “Questions,” or Marsha Ambrosius on “Don’t Keep Me Waiting,” Younge and Muhammad’s sound—a dark, smoky blend of sophisticated soul—remains the centerpiece of this album. There’s a strong visual component at play here, and as it unfolds, one can almost see the songs being performed at an after-hours club in 1920s Harlem. This is black excellence, a vital record that celebrates the grand lineage of soul, jazz and hip-hop.

Marcus J. Moore

Eartheater
IRISIRI

Merch for this release:
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)

On her first two albums, 2015’s back-to-back brilliant Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis, Alexandra Drewchin wrote songs that seemed set deep inside some mythical haunted forest; her icicle-drip harp and high, chilling voice functioned as a kind of ghostly guide, pulling you deeper and deeper into the trees and vines. On IRISIRI, her first for the Berlin label PAN, that world has gone liquid; album-opener “Peripheral” may open with a chilly latticework of harp, but it’s a fake-out; halfway through, what sounds like the bubbling of a digital swamp fizzes and pops its way into the mix, and from there on in, Drewchin is off into worlds uncharted. The way she uses her voice throughout IRISIRI is one of the album’s biggest revelations: she seems to be acting in almost constant defiance of melody; on “Inclined,” she punctuates spoken-word sentences with octave-leaping “Yeah!”s, and she layers her voice to create surreal, otherworldly harmonies. Regardless of what’s happening in the music—often, its an aqueous mix of electronics—Drewchin invents her own rhythms and cadences from line to line, stretching syllables out in an ultra-soprano, then letting some lines trail out slowly into silence. In our interview with Drewchin, she talked about the importance of intuition on the record, which feels accurate. The songs on IRISIRI follow a kind of sense-logic rather than conventional rules or structures. Its strange magic compels you to follow, and you are powerless to resist.

J. Edward Keyes

Flasher
Constant Image

When a DIY group steps into a more formal studio setting, with the support of a storied indie label, the results can sometimes feel sterilized, as if all the air, energy, and vitality has been sucked out of their previous work. Fortunately, that’s not the case for Flasher’s Constant Image, the D.C. post-punk trio’s first LP for Domino. Here, the group’s undeniable chemistry and ability to balance melodic hooks with tension and dry humor are on full display; I’ll probably be humming “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?,” from album closer “Business Unusual,” for weeks. Flasher have a great way of cutting to the quick without utilizing any of the usual aesthetic harshness post-punk often does; these are sweet confectionary songs with a brittle, brutal core, always a juxtaposition I’m a huge fan of.

Jes Skolnik

Kadhja Bonet
Childqueen

Merch for this release:
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)

Kadhja Bonet isn’t of this time. She’s 234 years old and, although she creates music, doesn’t identify as an artist. “I don’t like calling myself a singer—or even a musician,” Bonet has said. Fair enough. Nonetheless, Childqueen is one of the year’s best records so far, mostly because Bonet does a masterful job of orchestrating resonant work that shines whenever you find it. A mix of late-‘60s tropicalia and ‘70s soul, Childqueen draws a direct line to Come To My Garden era Minnie Riperton, Roberta Flack and Gal Costa, paying homage to those luminaries while setting its own unique course. Childqueen is sonically intricate, pushing the listener to dig deep beneath the surface. Songs “Delphine,” “Joy” and “Nostalgia” are largely ambient pieces that give equal weight to Bonet’s adept instrumentation and stunning vocal register. She’s an amazing vocalist, and on album centerpiece “Mother Maybe,” her falsetto climbs to its highest point, bringing the upbeat funk tune to its rightful close. In the end, Bonet wants you to choose your own adventure. Childqueen is majestic and intimate.

Marcus J. Moore

serpentwithfeet
soil

Merch for this release:
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)

To play serpentwithfeet’s soil is to walk with the singer through the muck of previous relationships. He doesn’t just dig into surface-level recollections, he navigates their darkest corners, punching holes through the suffocating darkness until only light remains. Throughout soil, serpent’s voice—a rich, aching tone steeped in gospel, R&B and opera—is on full display, and the music—courtesy of producers mmph, Clams Casino and Paul Epworth, and sound manipulator Katie Gately, is especially haunting, giving the LP a distinct gothic quality. “cherubim” is perhaps the best such example of these techniques: Above plodding drums, wobbly snyths and warped organs, serpent sings of devotion. “fragrant” depicts the tale of a jilted lover looking to stay connected with an ex. “I called all your ex-boyfriends and asked them for a kiss,” serpent declares. “I needed to know if they still carried your fragrance.” Lines like these speak to the raw honesty of soil, which, to me, is the record’s finest trait. It’s not easy being this vulnerable, yet serpent does an incredible job, setting a great example for the world to follow.

Marcus J. Moore

Tomb Mold
Manor Of Infinite Forms

Merch for this release:
Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD)

There comes a time when every musical dilettante has to cop to their blind spots, and it looks like this week is mine. So, here it is: I’m a relative newcomer to metal; it wasn’t the soundtrack of my youth, but rather of my 30s. My entryway came about 13 years ago in the form of Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, the first bona fide metal record I ever listened to front to back, and I spent the ensuing years disappearing into every dark corner and crevice of the genre that I could unearth. I mention this up front because metal fans raised on the music can spot a novice, and I have no intention of trying to pull one over on anybody. So let me also then confess that death metal, specifically, is one pocket of metal that still doesn’t fully click for me, which made it all the more surprising that I fell so hard for Manor of Infinite Forms, the second album from the Toronto band Tomb Mold. Maybe it’s because I can hear passing references to other metal substrata in its songs: the punishing opener works a greasy groove before descending into a melee of double-bass and bullet-point riffing; “Blood Mirror” flays a few nasty, dissonant chords in the intro and works a marauding, insistent stomp for the remaining six minutes. The bone-shattering “Abysswalker” comes on with the fury of classic black metal before pulling out into something that resembles hardcore’s lurch. There are spiraling silvery riffs laced throughout every song, pulling sections taut and encircling others with looping, silvery melodies. It’s a full-on beast of an album, one that will win over metal amateurs and lifers alike.

J. Edward Keyes

Back Catalog

Hawaiian T-Shirt
This Shit Does Not Concern You

The trend wheel spins around so quickly these days it’s tough to identify a band as an excellent purveyor of genre when, by the time you’ve tapped out the sentence, the genre has been played out to death by bands with the same 5 musical touchstones making the same 5 records that nobody will remember 5 minutes from now. So, with that caveat, forget what you think you think know about “post-punk” and hit play on Hawaiian T-Shirt’s debut full-length “This Shit Does Not Concern You, on which the spunky, ferocious L.A. three-piece sound like the unruly child of the B-52s and the Au Pairs with a bit of Siouxsie behind the eyes. The band first popped up on our radar back in April of 2017, when their first EP was featured in this column on the strength of joyful earworm “Chantelle” (rerecorded here without having lost an iota of charm), and everything that was great about the band then has been amplified, most tellingly their fearless use of dissonance that leaves the ear searching for a chord. Though Hawaiian T-Shirt are a particularly unrelenting listen in that they don’t care to be liked, they’re also not without a sense of humor (if the band name didn’t give it away) and despite its title This Shit Does Not Concern You is an overall optimistic record that has the capacity to both thrill and unnerve.

Mariana Timony

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