Paul Weller - "True Meanings"
(Parlophone / Warner, from 14th September)
So there it is, after all, the late work: Lastly, we praised Paul Weller as the perhaps only singer of his generation, who does not look back on a sentimental journey nostalgically, but looks ahead. In May, Weller, Modfather, British stylist and ex-linker, turned 60 - and obviously he did something with him.
"True Meanings," the ever-prolific, never-stopping musician's new album, is a journey into inwardness inspired by Irish and Scottish folklore, American country and soul, an acoustic journey into the traits of his soul. The strings languish, the guitars tremble, and brass fans lean into a contemplative rhythm. Here's a Mellotron, there a cello - otherwise Wellers's sanded-up voice, perfect for his new white-haired creator, is enough to carry these songs.
It is not so much a return to "Wild Wood," his best album of the nineties, as one might suppose in the face of this earthiness and woodiness: At that time, Weller, shattered by private setbacks, had lost in the thicket of life and shredded sunflowers in solitude , Today he glides wiser and more serenely over these labyrinthine forests, rises pastoral over the "Gravity", sees a few "Old Castles" as he glides past, waves to the spirit of "Bowie" with a breathy glam-rock derivate "Ah-Huuuh" and gives him on the way to the afterlife: "Live and learn that love is not unkind." Almost grandfather, Dadrocker.
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His new role as a spiritualized folk bard is dazzling to him when he plays it in crystalline-delicate songs like "Aspects" or in the gently sliding "The Soul Searchers". There Weller is very close to his own classics. But it's hard to be surprised when "Wishing Well" suddenly sounds like Neil Young or "May Love Travel With You" is sentimentally reveling in Burt-Bacharach-Bombast. The "White Horses" at the end seem a bit badly ridden.
After all: Weller expires kitsch here and there, but not the nostalgia. "True Meanings" is the status report of a soul who, in a turbulent world situation, has found a thoracic peace with and in nature. "I've got all around / I do not need anything else", he sings in "Movin 'On". And dreaming of a stringy "Sha-la-Laa" on string swinging. Where? The next album can be angry again. (7.3) Andreas Borcholte
Yves Tumor - "Safe In The Hands Of Love"
(Warp / Rough Trade, since September 6, CD / LP from October 12)
Only at the very end, in the cascading "Let The Lioness In You Flow Freely", Yves tumor actually lets out the beast. Anyone following the experimental noise and club music scene knows and fears the American musician from Tennessee who emigrated to Europe. In his concerts, like in post-industrial vaults like the "pillar" in the Berghain, he releases such a infernal shock noise on his lightly disoriented audience, that one does not even notice, how tumor has long since disappeared from the stage or DJ pulpit among peoples has mixed and unsuspecting concert visitors start from behind.
Then it comes to times - of course artistic intended - melee and scuffles. These are adrenaline-laden, highly disturbing and disruptive performances with a torture flair that blast genres like rock and pop and suck them to the brim of their essence - and that's why Tumor, who's also a brilliant musician, is one of Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) and Dominick Fernow (Vatican Shadow, Prurient) among the most agile figures in the genre.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 37
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Playlist on Spotify
1 Paul Weller: Aspects
2 Thom Yorke: Suspirium
3 Tamino: Habibi
4 Yves Tumor: Licking An Orchid
5 Julia Holter: I Shall Love 2
6 Puce Mary: Red Desert
7 Tim Hecker: This Life
8 Marie Davidson: So Right
9 Say Lou Lou: Golden Child
10 Jungle: Happy Man
All the more surprising that the African American now, for his fourth album, pushing back the disturbing noise to reveal his state of mind with equally astonishing sensitivity. "Faith In Nothing But Salvation" opens this epic trip with a jazz-wind overture, before "Economy Of Freedom" reduces itself to slippery minimal beats and ghost sounds, as if the artist's spirit, infused with inner demons and social repression, has to come first dark dungeon working to the light.
"Honesty" rattles and flutters on the 80s presets from the analog synthesizer to an ambient, yet haunted techno track, until "Noid" finally lets the previously muted vocals forward and with a real chorus ("911 ... can not trust them ") told by police violence against blacks. Musically, this moves between 90s hip-hop and industrial rock, a politically agitated groove reminiscent of Adam Sherburnes band Consolidated, but does not seem at all antique.
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"Licking An Orchid" (with singer James K.) is a near-pure pop ballad about sexual desire, when the pervasive white noise would not disturb: pleasure and suffering are always close together in Yve's tumor, the body is constantly threatened, penetrated , damaged and polished. In the theatrical center of the album, the dystopian spoken word monster "Hope In Suffering" (feat. Oxhy and Puce Mary), one's own skin becomes the last bastion against a "world in delusion and might". a potent, flexible weapon, but also at risk of becoming castrated. Whether as Selbstkasteiung or ordeal remains open.
The enemy could always be one's own ego, suggests Tumor in the "Recognizing The Enemy", a reduced on violins and percussion Emo-Indieballade that wants to empower as well as previously "Lifetime" with bubbling pathos to the stadium anthem. This is no longer club music, that opens up and its whole fragility of the mass.
But one hesitates to call this dizzy sound of sound and voices staggering in emotional ambivalences, swelling after fear-sweat. Because one senses that the bestial noise lurks constantly behind every security and familiarity promising melody. This nervous tension makes "Safe In The Hands Of Love" one of the most exciting albums of the year. (9.0) Andreas Borcholte
Low - "Double Negative"
(SubPop / Cargo, from 14th September)
From the twelfth album of a band one promises first of all not much stunning, but nice routine. On the last three records Low had played with dignified songs in the direction of Alterswerk. Late albums that made you want to hear the early ones again. With "Double Negative" was therefore not expected.
The trio has once again turned its slow, minimalist indie rock into something more than a quarter of a century after the debut album "I Could Live In Hope": Everything strives for space here. The guitar is largely gone, the eleven songs are composed of noise layers, Distortion, tiny tunes, the laconic voice of Alan Sparhawk and the bell-bright vocals of Mimi Parker. It's rustling and whirring and banging and pulsing in each song in a very different brittle rhythm - and often sounds more experimental than rock music.
How organic and yet contradictory disturbing sounds and melodies come together, that is quite singular; as if the songs had to defend themselves against these sounds. For example, on "The Son, the Sun", a three-minute piece of ambient noise and ethereal voices that makes you feel how serious Low meant it - and apparently perceived people as very needy of salvation.
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"I'm tired of seeing things," it says in the first song, "Quorum". This music tells of exhaustion and disappearance, with maximum presence even the smallest sound fitzels, and is almost constantly under great tension. But in the comparatively relaxed "Dancing and Fire" something like confidence is also communicated: "It's not the end / It's just the end of hope". The line actually sounds encouraging in this context!
Low play on "Double Negative" a music that wants to scrape off everything bad from the soul and knows that this is not possible. Thankfully, she tries anyway. (8.5) Benjamin Moldenhauer
Jungle - "For Ever"
(XL / Beggars, from 14th September)
Do you have to be suspicious when musicians say about their new album: "This time it's about real emotions"? What was it all about when you first agreed that music is always primarily about feelings and conveying feelings? The two Britons Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland are nice guys from the London middle class of Hammersmiths, so you do not want to accuse them of anything bad, except maybe a certain blockheads. As a jungle they released an album in 2014 full of blue-eyed funk, which they initially did not know because they had hidden their Whiteness in their first videos ("Busy Earnin '", "The Heat") behind black dancers and remained anonymous.
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM a listened-Mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
The smell of cultural appropriation of African American narrative and signs has been with them ever since, even though they developed into a pop-act of up to eight, mainly live, in the years that followed. "For Ever" is, after a long break, their second album.
The songs on it are about the - ultimately bitterly failed - search for private happiness under Californian sun. The whole thing should sound like a "post-apocalyptic radio station playing break up songs," say the two lovesick patients. One does not know exactly what that means, unless it hides in it the longing that after the recent court not so heated about identity politics is discussed as today. In any case, post-apocalyptic music is more exciting, disruptive and less relaxed than these amazingly hip-stomping songs of separation.
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Being back with the "real emotions" that just do not want to reveal themselves in the falsetto choirs of Watson and McFarland. "Heavy California" at least draws a nice melancholy hookline from the contrast of laid back and heartache. "Happy Man" is a successful "Busy Earnin '" infusion - and "Home" leaves the eternal Discogroove for a change in favor of an almost touching ballad. Also, "More And More It Is Not Easy" suggests that the sedate simmering radio stew could have Soulfood potential despite the tendency to bland milk soup.
But then Jungle are not the 21st century Bee Gees trained in Daft Punk, but a much too controlled and perfectionist designed update of the Average White Band. (5.0) Andreas Borcholte
Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)