Album of the week
RUN THE JEWELS
Run the Jewels 3
Run the Jewels, Inc
There’s a (doubtless apocryphal) story that when the Pope first saw Michelangelo’s statue of David, he asked the sculptor how he could create such a masterpiece. Michelangelo allegedly replied: “I just chip away everything that doesn’t look like David.” Both flippant and profoundly true, the comment could equally be applied to RTJ3, on which El-P and Killer Mike have ruthlessly stripped away everything that doesn’t sound like an amazing hip-hop album. Every line and beat hits home. The relentless focus on stuff that matters is clear from the start, as El-P tells us that the duo’s uncompromising message “came from feeling what a pure absence of hope can do”. The track Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost) has a sample of Martin Luther King, “A riot is the language of the unheard”. But if most of the album sounds like a warning — “We both hear the same sound coming/And it sounds like war” — there is also room for reflection. On Thursday in the Danger Room, El-P recalls the selfishness that wished a dying friend already dead “because [I] felt too weak to be strong”. The first essential album of 2017. ME
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ROSE ELINOR DOUGALL
Stellular
Republic of Music
More than six years on from her debut album, the former Pipette and Mark Ronson collaborator returns with a follow-up so good, you wonder how she could ever have doubted (and Dougall implies she has) that she was born to make music. Working with Boxed In’s Oli Bayston, she brings her characteristic vocal style — precisely enunciated but strangely detached — to a succession of pointillist pop songs about lives on hold, dreams deferred or abandoned. (Check out Strange Warnings, Poison Ivy and Space to Be.) Teeming with electro and psych-pop textures, they’re like a series of exquisite miniatures, alternately forlorn and euphoric, tender and lethal. DC
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RONIKA
Lose My Cool
Record Shop
If your clubbing heyday was during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, and you fancy a trip down memory lane, Ronika is here to help. On her second album, the Nottingham-born songwriter and producer jumps between Jam and Lewis-style slow jams and arms-aloft retro pop. The sassy single Principle is probably aimed at a cooler crowd than those who can spot its Mary Jane Girls steals; All Comes Back 2 U doesn’t bother to disguise its debt to the Pointer Sisters’ Automatic; and the standout title track is a seductive take on Janet-era Janet Jackson. Woozy electronics are an occasional reminder that music has moved on, but the songs without them are far more fun. LV
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MENACE BEACH
Lemon Memory
Memphis Industries
Menace Beach are the Leeds-based Ryan Needham and Liza Violet — and this is very much a Violet album. Needham explains their creative process thus: “Liza got that look in the eye, and a head-down, blinkers-on thing, and only a moron would try to get in the way of that.” Menace Beach produce a winning blend of Kinks-ish riffs and fuzzy 1990s alt-pop (think Belly or the Breeders), probably best heard on the opening salvo of Give Blood and Maybe We’ll Drown. If you feel that Violet’s Scary Monsters-style guitar solo on the latter hits the spot, then you’ll want to explore the rest. ME
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THE THREE SOUNDS
Groovin’ Hard: Live at the Penthouse, 1964-1968 Resonance
Was there ever a more dynamic and bluesy pianist than Gene Harris? Too extrovert to appeal to the more puritanical jazz scribes (much like one of his role models, Erroll Garner), he turns in a vivacious display on these dates at a Seattle club. His touch is unfailingly soulful. The Night Has a Thousand Eyes might start off in bossa style, but the shifts in register spring constant surprises. This is as uplifting a collection as Harris’s classic recording with the saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, another master sometimes dismissed as a crowd-pleaser. CD
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JULIE BYRNE
Not Even Happiness
Basin Rock
The Clash summed it up rather well: “Should I stay or should I go?” Musically, Byrne is a thousand miles away from the punk band, but her theme is similar. She has spent much of her life travelling, and seen it as a positive thing — a freedom. Having settled in New York, she questions whether it was more an attempt to run away. In hushed songs that lie close to early Cat Power, Nick Drake and maybe even a more sombre Joni Mitchell, Byrne explores this conflict. Her vocals — more breathed than sung — are a balm for the soul. ME
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AMY SKY, OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN, BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN
Liv On
OBA
“There are no words I can sing.” Songs directly addressing bereavement and illness walk a narrow line: how to explore profound emotions without sentimentality? Not all the numbers here pass that difficult test, but as an example of the therapeutic function of music — the project is a collaboration with a hospice — it’s a courageous enterprise all the same. The elegiac Sand and Water is the pick of the bunch in a collection that draws on tested Nashville values. The trio are playing UK dates this month. CD
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AGITPOP OF THE WEEK
AUSTRA
Future Politics
Domino
Recorded before the coming of Trump, this third album from the Toronto band led by Katie Stelmanis ushers in a year that many predict will see a flowering of politically driven music. Indeed, the band’s manifesto for Future Politics could almost be an agitpop primer. As if aware that activism needs to coexist with a bit of fun to guard against jadedness in the ranks, Austra deliver an album bursting with electro-pop choruses and beats. On tracks such as We Were Alive, Utopia and Gaia, Stelmanis’s siren vocals soar over a soundscape that channels Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, the Human League and Björk: sonic nourishment for the fight ahead. DC
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MG1J4AH/ref=nosim/?tag=thesunday-21
MUST-HAVE REISSUE
T.REX
The Slider
Demon
Released in 1972, at the height of T.Rexstasy, The Slider captures Marc Bolan in his pomp, on an album whose hit singles — Metal Guru and Telegram Sam — helped give T.Rex their third Top 10 in a row. With Tony Visconti at the controls (piquant, given that he also worked with Bolan’s arch rival, David Bowie), The Slider struts, preens and poses, yet there is a bucolic wistfulness to the songs surrounding the glammed-up tracks that harks back to the band’s folkier, more psychedelic roots. Forty-five years on, it stands the test of time. DC
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Breaking act
Courtney Marie Andrews
Who is she? The Arizonan sings of fractured relationships, the lure of escape and the comfort of familiarity with a catch-in-her-voice delivery that brings a lump to the throat and a chill to the heart. On her new album, Honest Life, Andrews melds dovetailing, Joni Mitchell-like melodies with pin-sharp lyrics that recall the pre-didactic Laura Marling, over a country sound bed of keening pedal steel and cascading piano. It makes for a stunning combination.
When’s the music available? Friday, on Loose; soundcloud.com/loose-music. DC
The hottest tracks
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Georgia: Feel It A call to arms for women in music, the north Londoner’s dubby, beat-heavy new track is joyous and unfettered.
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The Shins: Name for You The indie favourites take a swipe at misogyny, set to an earworm of a melody.
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Snakehips ft MO: Don’t Leave The dance duo team up with one of pop’s hottest stars on a soon-to-be-ubiquitous streaming staple. DC
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