Thomas Blake

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. 

An open secret, Cass McCombs is a talent lauded by critics and peers but remains something of an outsider. On Interior Live Oak, he’s in predictably fine form, delivering one of his strongest collections of songs that showcase an easily worn, hard-won maturity, with a perfect balance between concision and variation. This satisfying and beguiling album leaves you hoping it will finally earn him the broader recognition he so deserves.

Fletcher Tucker’s ‘Kin’ is a more earthy, rather than a cosmic music; it genuinely sounds like nothing else, an album full of ritualistic sonic patterns and precisely detailed shifts in tone and mood, an album rooted less in a single landscape than in the very idea of landscape, and all the ancientness and weirdness that implies.

Cory Hanson delivers a rare combination: clever arrangements and emotional heft. ‘I Love People’ feels like a continuation of 2023’s Western Cum, conjuring up dusty roads and shimmering horizons with rolling country-rock and mature piano ballads. Nailing this many styles is tough, but Hanson’s surefooted songwriting weaves the disparate elements into a vivid, unapologetically American tapestry with an almost magical precision.