Aldous Harding - "Designer"
(4AD / Beggars, since April 26th)
On the one hand this is one of the best pop albums of the year, on the other hand it is so much more. You can let this music wash over you like a cleansing bath. You can bathe in the soft air ambience of "Fixture Picture", let yourself be flattered by "The Barrel", like a Angus - & - Julia Stone ballad or "Treasure" like a piece of Damien Rice's fat: all the longing Melodies, all the melancholy melt, everything there. That alone is great - and fulfills every promise made by New Zealand singer and musician Aldous Harding in 2017 with her also beautiful, but still brittle second album "Party" and soft hymns like "Horizon".
However, if you dive deeper into "Designer", and you should definitely, the warm harmonious gene begins to tingle, lovely text lines lolled like nettle threads on the skin and leave lasting irritation. Aldous Harding, actually called Hannah, knows very well how to pour her general struggles with the world, love, all human cramps into increasingly perfect pop songs. She now sings full-bodied and with new accents, John Parish (including PJ Harvey), who also already "Party" supervised, made for a high-quality, instrumental aufgeplüschte production.
Harding remains a master of cognitive dissonance. An irritating Uncanny Valley feeling of her music reveals itself especially during live performances or him her visually absurd video clips, in which the artist shows strangely choppy or mocant awkward dance moves, as if she were a living gif animation. She fixes the viewer with a fixed, rapt-looking gaze, which captivates but is also deeply disturbed. Some critics have called this ambiguous style of "Gothic Folk", but you do not have to start with genre attributions here.
Especially since you can only guess what Harding is exactly. What leads back to the lyrical barbs in their songs: Alone the single "The Barrel" has one of the strangest choruses of recent pop history, happily trumpeted he goes like this: "It's already dead / I know you have the dove / I ' m not gettin 'wet / Looks like a date is set / Show the ferret to the egg ". Yeah, show the ferret the egg, but it's already dead? And luckily you still have the dove? Hm.
A few lines later, at least, there is the hint that fear of loss of control or panic may be preceded by life-long determination through motherhood and marriage: "When you have a child, that's how the braiding / And in that braid you stay". "Treasure" also seems to be about the choice between autonomy and the braid of a relationship or family plan: "A rock in my hand / A brave cover of love".
There stands the woman, who raised the stone before the beloved, who could be her soul-mirror. Rarely did the word "honey" sound more poisoned than here: "I've got my eye on you now / Treasure," she hisses like Gollum to the ring. In the trembling finale "Pilot" she reveals attachment fears and a hesitation to act as a "designer" of her own life project. Whenever it comes, an abyss opens under it, "like height under a pilot". She tries to work, but she's just a coward: "I try to be light, stop the low talk / But I am a coward, and Camus was right."
Already her mother, she sings in the piano-chamber play "Damn", scolded her as a spoilsport: "My mother said 'Why must you drag all the hopes out of bed?' / I all have our reasons, I meant ". Of course, so much laconic misanthropy can only inspire. The climax of the existentialist desperation that turns Aldous Harding into sweet-sour pop on this great album is the beautifully-flawed thrown-out ballad "Zoo Eyes": "Why, What Am I Doing in Dubai?" me? ". But sure. (9.0) Andreas Borcholte
Price query time:
30.04.2019, 14:00 clock
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designer
label:
4ad / Beggars Group / Indigo
Price:
EUR 10.42
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Schoolboy Q: "Crash Talk"
( Top Dawg / Interscope / Universal, since April 26th )
Is it possible to play albums in the reverse order on Spotify and others? If not, dear technicians, "crash talk" would be the right time for an update.
Listening to the fifth album from Quincy Matthew Hanley alias Schoolboy Q namely from back to front, you could at least come after the first six songs on the idea that this is the meanest, darkest, broken, best hip-hop album of the current year. "Attention," for example, the last song on "Crash Talk," gropes along a monotonous piano glitch and a tectonic distortion-sounding bass, while Hanley recites an oppressively blunt snippet of his rather uncomfortable life story.
And that would be just the beginning: "Water" does the trick of a truly non-embarrassing pop-trap excursion, including one of the hour Lil 'Baby. "Crash" declined by a hair, why success and personal happiness are not necessarily come as a package. "The Wit Em" sounds about as relaxed as a nocturnal walk as a Central European tourist through South Central. "Dangerous" (featuring Kid Cudi) sets Hanley's struggle with his depression so insistent that it gets you scared yourself. And "Floating" (feat. 21 Savage) grooves as chilly as if the two rappers had taken an ice bath in the studio. Hip-Hop will not sound much better in 2019.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 18
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Playlist on Spotify
1. FKA Twigs: Cellophane
2. Aldous Harding: Zoo Eyes
3. Tara Nome Doyle: Down With You
4th Vampire Weekend: Unbearably White
5. Schoolboy Q feat. 21 Savage: Floating
6. Stormzy: Vossi Bop
7. DJ Nate: Bring Your Best Crack
8. Minimal Violence: New Hard Catch
9. Flying Lotus: Takashi
10. The Pearlfishers: Love & Other Hopeless Things
But that's exactly why Hanley would have been well advised to leave after just over 15 minutes - and to put the best EP of the year in the trophy cabinet. Because the rest of the 14 tracks can not hold this level. Instead, Hanley acts in songs like "Lies" (feat. Ty Dolla $ ign), "Chopstix" (feat. Travis Scott) or "5200", which sounds like a karaoke version of a B-side of Kendrick Lamar's "Black Panther" - Soundtrack dressed like a rapper doing something rather atypical: looking to work to get his job done: curricular service.
Where the predecessor "Blank Face" hardly allowed any air to breathe because of its heavy weight, the first half of "Crash Talk", which was mostly produced according to the rules of the streaming economy, is, well, over at some point. Hopefully, this is at least financially worthwhile for Hanley. (7.5) Dennis Pohl
Price query time:
30.04.2019, 14:00 clock
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Crash talk
label:
Interscope (Universal Music)
Price:
EUR 14,18
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Caterina Barbieri: "Ecstatic Computation"
(Editions Mego, from May 3)
The movement music of the last decades is now consumed on the treadmill in the gym, on the highway or in urban stop-and-go. So techno is everywhere today, where you can not get away from it. Since then it is logical that the genre also tried esthetically states of solidification and the Ashtanga-isation of the music progressing cheerfully.
The non-dance techno celebrates its high-fervor at the Berlin Atonal festival, where a very international and very black-robed audience in the concrete cathedral of a former power plant exercises itself as an oscillator-drunkard: body tension and breath control instead of crate-stacking dance.
Caterina Barbieri is a figurehead of this introvert. The Berlin-based Italian producer has long since said goodbye to the Bumm-Bumm-continuum. She studied classical guitar and philosophy as well as the connection between the traditional music of northern India and the minimalism of composers like La Monte Young. From these influences Barbieri forms something almost manic and monothematic.
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM an intercepted mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
Like their previous albums, "Ecstatic Computation" is limited to just a handful of unveiled synthesizer sounds. The focus is on crystalline sound quality and transparency in the structures. At the same time, Barbieri's concept of strictness is at times blended with sunshine harmonies in some places and becomes downright fanatical, at least in the ambiance of a concrete cathedral. Sometimes it sounds like you accidentally soloed the track with the keyboard arpeggio on an early Human League song.
"Ecstatic Computation" is synth-pop under the auspices of an algorithmically organized society. Two out of six tracks are addressed to a du, which, however, does not have to be human: "Closest Approach To Your Orbit" and "Pinnacles Of You". Orbit, mountaintops - the approach of I and you takes place here with some respect distance. States of ecstatic hope, as they are known from the Minnegesang, in which the worshiped adored only from a distance, transfers Caterina Barbieri into the age of calculation. Could the desire also freeze? What. It is merely misplaced into the interior of a world in which the machines are now allowed to learn not to dance anymore. (7.4) Arno Raffeiner
Price query time:
30.04.2019, 14:20
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Ecstatic Computation
label:
Editions Mego
Price:
EUR 5.94
(MP3 Download)
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Diet: "Positive Disintegration"
(Blackest Ever Black / Cargo, since April 26th)
The members of the Berlin Band Diet operate in the secondary occupation of record shops and cafes, but still have time to read obscure Polish psychologists. Good for you! The title of their second album, "Positive Disintegration," goes back to a theory by Kazimierz Dabrowski, who once stated reassurance for the retired, incarcerated and gloomy post-punks of the world. True individuality, according to the researcher, is based not least on anxiety experiences. Those who do not live and embrace such will forever remain in a state of basic modesty.
Of course that would be crap, especially for a band with a proud hardcore past. So Diet got chattered again, after a four-year break and intermittent limbo (the singer wanted to return to Australia but has stayed) to record a party record for the Dabrowski crowd with "Positive Disintegration". Eight well-rehearsed songs tell of the different shades of gray that characterize a big city life in the financial and emotional dispo area. It is about the sweet temptation to deny everyday life in one's own trendy district for want of interesting encounters or conversations on autopilot. And to resist this temptation.
Or, as a precautionary measure, we could at least mean it that way. The lyrics sound like "Positive Disintegration" in an Australian-colored Commander English, which is easier to feel than to understand. Diet have buried the vocal tracks of the record very deep in the mix and otherwise trusts in old post-punk tricks of Killing Joke or PIL (in wholesome form of the day). At the dominant appearance of their rhythm group, the gnashing guitars and the own life of the feedbacks one recognizes them as genre-historically top-informed musicians.
Not only Dabrowski's theses will have internalized the diet. Maybe they even read the post-punk standard work "Rip It Up And Start Again" by the English music journalist Simon Reynolds. However, what they have ahead of many of the bands they recognize are the ability and the will to hit: Especially on the A side of "Positive Disintegration" diets bring their desolation into astonishingly streamlined form. That later a piece of electro-pop may also be used? Probably has to do with their arduous way to true individuality. (7.3) Daniel Gerhardt
Price query time:
30.04.2019, 14:30
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DISPLAY
Positive Disintegration [Vinyl LP]
label:
Blackest Ever Black / Cargo
Price:
EUR 22,83
(Vinyl)
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Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)