ALBUM: Horsegirl – ‘Versions Of Modern Performance’

With their debut album, Versions of Modern Performance, Horsegirl have translated the world of underground underage Chicago into 30 minutes of sludgy jubilation. Thudding drums, strangled guitar lines and catchy choruses: it’s a time-honoured formula, executed here with vigour and original flair.

The band produced this record as college freshmen and high school seniors and it is bursting with a fine balance of youthful exuberance and nuance beyond their years. Within a tight instrumental framework, the group explore a range of emphases and styles, from the more straightforward guitar pop of tunes like ‘Anti-Glory’ to textural instrumental interludes and the unusually weighted ‘Fall of Horsegirl’, in which the guitar foregrounds the vocal line.

The integrity of the artistic scene from which Horsegirl have emerged defines the sound, attitude and presentation of this music. The group are keen to champion the work of the network of fellow creatives too young to get into most concerts going on in Chicago and forced to organise shows and create among themselves. Their videos employ the talents of friends and peers who put their directorial and kitchen dancing skills to use in assertively homemade productions (check out the video for ‘Billy’). There is an infectious DIY enthusiasm in everything this band does, and this reverberates through Versions Of Modern Performance.

Undaunted by the transition from high school band to signees with heavyweight indie label Matador, the group have made a deliberate effort to remain faithful to the simple setup that has taken them this far. Describing this self-consciously as “the debut bare-bones album”, they bring the sound of their various basement rehearsal rooms to the studio. The choice of John Agnello as producer suits this aim to be true to the band’s roots, given that his CV, which includes Dinosaur Jr. and The Breeders, reads like a list of the influences you can hear working throughout the record.

Though this record takes many cues from the sound and approach of much of that American brand of alt rock that has been around since the mid-80s, the group make this sound their own. It feels like the natural outcome of three imaginative rock musicians playing in someone’s basement; an honest, instinctive debut free from contrived affectations.

Listen to Versions Of Modern Performance on bandcamp or Spotify

Follow Horsegirl on Twitter, Instagram & Facebook

Photo Credit: Cheryl Dunn

Lloyd Bolton
@franklloydwleft
@lloyd_bolton

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ALBUM: Cate Le Bon – ‘Pompeii’

You awake, eyes wild, dreams of Pompeii still flashing through your mind. It’s dark outside, what time is it? A rhythm shuffles over the horizon, an unidentified pulse of percussion and a shambling couple of wind instruments. Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth album, has begun, with ‘Dirt on the Bed’.

Yet again, she has created a remarkable, singular work. Pompeii is continuously rewarding, an album to return to again and again until it swallows you into its world. Like its artwork, a version of the Tim Presley painting that served as the central inspiration for the entire project, it possesses an aged, grainy feel in spite of its fresh originality. The sound is science fiction. As if from a parallel 80s, it is drenched in synths while evading the worn conventions of synth pop, instead assimilating those sounds into the Cate Le Bon style.

The brilliant ‘French Boys’ is punctuated by a beautiful steel pan hook that is mechanical and melancholy, creaking with the sad nostalgia of an abandoned oil rig in some post-apocalyptic landscape. Later tunes like the momentous ‘Cry Me Old Trouble’ develop walls of synths that provide epic and strange backdrops to the lyrics, complementing their tone perfectly.

Le Bon’s writing builds on the vocabulary of the ancient and the spiritual which she introduced to her work on her previous album, Reward. It constitutes perhaps the best example to date of her ability to create affecting lyrics out of abstract emotive language. Lines like “cry me old trouble”, “my heart broke a century”, “raise a glass in a season of ash and pour it over me”, they have that Symbolist combination of familiarity and mystery. Like a dream, her writing makes some unconscious sense even when individual elements evade comprehension.

Recent Cate Le Bon albums have felt terrestrial in their experimentation, each album conveying a kind of landscape. Crab Day was shingly, coastal, Reward was mountainous and sublime. By comparison, this album feels like it takes place on a swampy exoplanet, with thicker air and a slightly stronger gravitational force. In other words, Cate Le Bon has broken loose from Earth and is operating from a world of her own, free from any obvious external reference point and working according only to her original logic.

The closer, ‘Wheel’, provides a cyclical end to the album, an approximate reprise of ‘Dirt on the Bed’ with a palette expanded on the basis of all that we’ve gained through the 9-song track list. Only Le Bon can bound this sound-world, can make sense of it and condense it into an ordered and beautiful album. She is yet to make a bad record, and this might well be her finest work yet.

Order your copy of Cate Le Bon’s new album Pompeii here (released 4th February)

Follow Cate Le Bon on bandcamp, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram & Facebook

Photo Credit: Cate Le Bon

Lloyd Bolton
@franklloydwleft
@lloyd_bolton

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ALBUM: Anika – ‘Change’

Moving beyond the punishing sounds and default to doom-saying that’s often defined her previous work, Berlin-based musician Anika‘s new album Change is a more positive cut, possessing some of her most accessible work yet. Set for release via Sacred Bones & Invada Records on 23rd July, the album is not without its jagged, angsty moments, but on the whole it’s certainly a cleaner offering.

Fans of the musician’s existing output – a 2010 solo debut performed alongside Beak> and a string of releases with Exploded View – will recognise the blueprint of locked drum & bass grooves, noisy synths and Anika’s haunting voice floating above it with a cracked serenity that feels as though it could collapse into tears or hysterical laughter at any moment. The key sonic difference with Change is its polished quality, which lends a new refinement and approachability to Anika’s work. At times it feels a little too neat, lacking that terrifying, paint-stripping howl that makes for the best Exploded View tracks. Having said that, it opens up a new side to Anika, one that many will want to hear more from.

Anika reports that the words on Change were written largely “on the spot”, going some way to explaining the recourse to simple yet enigmatic refrains, felt most urgently on tracks like the thunderous opener ‘Finger Pies’ and the disquieting ‘Rights’. Her willingness to employ a smoother set of sounds allows for some unexpectedly great pop moments. ‘Critical’ is lead by a neat synth line that could have come straight from Jane Weaver’s Modern Cosmology, wonderfully plucking the song from the murk of a driving rhythm section.

‘Change’ is an excellent track, epitomising the huge shift Anika makes as an artist on this record. It offers a guarded optimism in its hedged refrain “I think we can change” and tempers the album’s concerns about the destructive nature of man, articulated on tracks like ‘Never Coming Back’ (inspired by Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring and our destruction of the natural world), enabling us to find consolation in our agency as individuals to avert future consequences of human activity. It is telling that ‘Change’ is the eponymous track and that its central idea was chosen to be the defining theme of the album, creating room for a more sanguine outlook.

The album closes with ‘Wait for Something’, which, like ‘Change’, plays a crucial role in forging the overall mood of the piece. Emerging out of the claustrophobic terror of ‘Freedom’, we are encouraged to find solace in its vagueness, in the belief that some salvation will come, even if we cannot conceptualise the form it might take. People often draw the obvious and not entirely helpful comparison between Anika and Nico, but as the drums kick in here it feels more like we’re listening to the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, pushing us into the realm of unadulterated pop rock. Sitting on those flying keys and cymbal crashes, listeners can really feel the joyous optimism Anika seeks to leave them with.

Sonically drifting away from brutal electro-terror and thematically more positive than earlier efforts, Anika’s Change is an interesting transitional album in sound and spirit, not entirely comfortable in its optimism, but telling for its willingness to seek it out.

Follow Anika on bandcamp, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram & Facebook

Photo Credit: Sven Gutjahr

Lloyd Bolton
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