Today I am feeling like Bilbo: “…thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread”. After Switzerland, the excellent Wide Awake festival on Saturday and an associated very late night, I am a sleepy boy this Bank Holiday Monday. So I’m giving myself a bit of a break, and I’m giving you a playlist that fits my slightly tired, minorly nostalgic and majorly wistful mood. Let’s get straight into it.
Kendrick Lamar kicks us off this week, with his weird slice of theatrical hip-hop “United in Grief” that opens his 2022 record Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Kendrick has obviously been in the news a bunch recently, which as a self-proclaimed life-long Drake–hater has made me a happy man. But whilst I’ve enjoyed the ups and downs of the beef, the best result is people revisiting the unfairly maligned Mr. Morale and realising what a truly excellent record it is. My brain is a little too dead to fully give justice to my thoughts on this album, so maybe I’ll try again in a future postcard to you, but at a base level it is one of those albums that I can vividly remember listening to for the first time and really hearing it: being simultaneously floored by the (at times uncomfortably raw) lyrics, the wide array of interwoven themes and narrative arc, and the sheer number of ideas being thrown around at any one time. I think that alone says a lot. “United in Grief” encompasses all of this in a tight four minutes. The combination of bone-rattling drums and swooping cellos in the latter part of the track I find particularly amazing, hitting some perfect timbre for my ears. If you’ve not given it a go before, this is your official instruction. Go forth and listen, and prepare to be amazed.
From one underappreciated project to another, our next highlighted track is the new single by Cincinnatti artist WHY?. I fucking love WHY?, and it makes me very sad that people have generally slept on their last couple of records, the melancholic and very beautiful Moh Lean and the adventurous and slightly ADHD AOKOHIO. But if this track is anything to go by, their new album might be the point that this streak turns around. I think this new song is a real stunner, distilling the essential parts of WHY?—dry and self depricating lyrics, double-tracked vocals, touches of hip hop alongside extremely indie instrumentation—into something that feel fresh and hopeful despite the slightly dour subject matter. Those choral swells of “Maria” just get better and better throughout the track, until they positively explode by the end. And how can you not love something with the line “and I’m a can of coke/flattened by a thousand cars”? I’ve been listening to this a lot recently, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Finally, we have a track by Corridor, a psych-rock group from Montreal who are a new discovery for me. I found out about Corridor not from their music, but from their extremely excellent album cover, which I’d seen on several music review sites and thought in response: “I have to listen to that”. I mean, just fucking look at it:
Genius. Anyway, I’m really happy to report that the music more than stacks up to the lofty ambitions set by the record cover. If you’re sad that Deerhunter seem to have given up the ghost, you can rejoice in finding this band. The cut I’ve chosen here “Pellicule” could easily fit on Halcyon Digest, which if you know me is a real strong bit of praise. It’s a hypnotic joy of a track; listening to it with my eyes closed I can imagine being bourne aloft on a rising thermal over the baking English countryside. It’s wonderfully produced too, full of warmth and brightness that fits the ever-present static hum that swims around the edges of the song. I guess for once you can judge a book by its cover.
The Tidal link is here for you folks once more. I hope you’ve all had a great weekend and are taking it easy today. My brain will be back to full functionality next week, I promise!
Postcard 19: 27/05/2024.
Kendrick Lamar - United In Grief
Grizzly Bear - gun-shy
Shizka Ueda - hidamari
Dirty Three - Rising below
WHY? - The Letters, Etc.
Corridor - Pellicule
Jacken Elswyth - Sussex Waltz
Broken Social Scene - Guilty Cubicles
Arthur Russell - I Couldn’t Say It To Your Face
Otis Spann - Ain’t Nobody’s Business