Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake lives in the West Country with his wife and his son. He writes things down and looks things up for a living. He likes wine, cricket and modernism. And lots of black coffee.
We chat to Junior Brother, whose songs are known for veering between the intensely personal and the hotly political. On his third album, The End, the Dublin-based songwriter’s ragged and uncompromising delivery reaches new heights of unexpected beauty, strangeness and relevance. Throughout the interview, his answers to our questions were considered and wide-ranging.
Big Thief’s Double Infinity was always going to be different. While it’s leaner than their last, its sonic range is wider. It is an album dedicated to corporeal impermanence, and to its flipside: love and its constant presence. It goes without saying that it’s big on ideas. It’s also big on melodic innovation and collaborative spirit. And most importantly, it’s a record with a gigantic heart.
On “Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople”, the music and poetry exist symbiotically, growing out of the same physical and political landscape. Williams has a gift of kindling revolutionary thought through a sense of responsibility, to the land and to each other. It’s a message the world needs to hear, and on this beautiful, angry and groundbreaking live album, he gets that message across with unrivalled eloquence.
Good Times is the latest offering from Alexei Shishkin. “…pop culture, poetics, psychology and philosophy are rolled into a surreal, lumpy ball and garnished with a palatable – and memorable – indie-pop melody.” Despite Shishkin’s lo-fi beginnings and his continuing willingness to drink from the well of slacker aesthetics, Good Times is a bold and – dare we say it – polished artistic statement.
With this year’s Supersonic Sunday-lineup featuring some of KLOF’s favourites, we went along for the ride. Bridget Hayden, Jackie-O Motherf-cker, Hedgling, Six Organs of Admittance, Cinder Well, Jennifer Reid, Poor Creature, Richard Dawson, Funeral Folk and The Bug & Warrior Queen were outstanding. On the strength of these performances, Supersonic can claim to be not just the best small festival in the country, but the best of any size.
James Yorkston, Nina Persson, and Johanna Söderberg form the perfect trio on “Songs for Nina and Johanna,” creating a masterful blend of melancholy and some unexpected emotional uplift. They seem to have invigorated his work while he, in turn, has provided them with some of his most lyrically poignant songs.
On Junior Brother’s third album, The End, Ronan Kealy displays real genius in the way he links ancient themes, such as the album’s underlying central motif of fairy forts, to our contemporary plight. “we can do nothing other than hang on his every word, words that slip from calm to fervid to agonised. It’s a journey we are willing to take again and again.”
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin’s Ghosted I and II freewheeled across a matrix whose corners were marked by krautrock, ambient, jazz and freely improvised modernism, III adds even more dimensions. It’s the sound of a band who know each other well enough that they can begin to concentrate on the things they don’t yet know, the unexplored musical directions that open up when they play together.
Wao is living proof that Joseph Shabason & Nicholas Krgovich and Tenniscoats, two utterly distinctive musical acts, can collaborate successfully and create something new without losing any of their own potency in the process. This outwardly unassuming album is as wise and beautiful and unexpected as anything currently happening in the furthest-flung outposts of music.
Pareidolia is a subtle and teasing record, beautiful and sometimes bewildering. It has an engrossing element that resembles the arc of a story, which is difficult to achieve in improvisational music but which gives you an insight into how closely and how well Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke work together, and how much background work they put into this intuitive, cohesive album.
With Patterns, Katy Pinke & Will Graefe nail the perfect cover album, hitting an impeccable balance between variety of material and consistency of tone. While covering well-known songs by Bobbie Gentry, The Beach Boys, Elliott Smith, SZA, Frank Ocean, Paul Simon and Jeff Buckley, you could come to Patterns without knowing any of these songs, and it would still be an entrancing and rewarding listen.
Marissa Nadler is perhaps the most distinctive and gifted songwriter working in the nebulous realm of dark folk, and New Radiations feels like a perfect distillation of her unsettlingly graceful music: essential for long-time fans and ideal for newcomers. It could easily become a career-defining album.