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.
On The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s “Sasquatch Landslide”, there are instrumental wails and squalls, bits of melody careen into the middle distance, an electronic soup bubbles away, and a thick buzz underpins everything. While it sounds like it could be messy, it’s not; it’s more like the semi-organised bustle of a busy souk, with its tension between chaos and order, where every sound has its meaning and its place.
Michael Hurley’s final album, Broken Homes and Gardens, finds him in essential form: digressive, surreal, jokey, ultimately moving. A folk prankster with a poet’s soul. A fitting way to cap a thirty-odd album legacy that is as important as practically any songwriter you care to mention. He sounds like he had a whole lot more up his sleeve. He always did.
John Elliott of The Little Unsaid has a way of drawing listeners in with universal truths presented in the most personal – and often poetic – of ways. On Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier, the album moves from intimate piano ballads to raw blues-rock and stately meditations, confirming The Little Unsaid as one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary music.
On ‘Forgetting Is Violent’, Patrick Shiroishi tackles racism at large, both in the past and from a contemporary standpoint. That his work carries such depth of meaning, even at its most minimal, is a testament to his skill as a composer and musician, but also listener and interpreter of stories. The album is a lightning rod for those stories, a vivid warning from history and a vibrant cri de coeur.
The key ingredient of “A Danger to Ourselves” is depth. It is an album of unfathomable musical depths, but perhaps more importantly, it is an album about depth of feeling, the abyss from which desire springs like a liquid flame. Lucrecia Dalt gives herself over completely to exploring this depth, and the singular work of art that emerges is as detailed and as unexpected as any treasure.
His ability to slip unseen from folky pastoralism to improvised experimentation puts Glenn Kimpton at the forefront of the current group of British acoustic guitarists taking their inspiration from foundational American exponents like Robbie Basho and John Fahey. He is in good company with those names, and he doesn’t seem out of place. Small Show is assured and highly rewarding.
The latest in the Ceremonial Counties tape series from Folklore Tapes covers Bedfordshire, tackled by Radiophoric Labs, a hauntological project of unknown provenance who does a compelling job of creating an atmosphere of dreary, post-apocalyptic dread; and Greater London falls to Wooden Tape, the alias of Tim Maycox, a Liverpool art teacher whose focus is the commuter town of Surbiton. They present two very different sides of the hauntological coin.
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.