Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Official audio: tUnE-yArDs, Lykke Li, Marika Hackman, School Of Language

tUnE-yArDs - Water Fountain

The first release from Merrill's third album Nikki Nack, which like every other album made in the last nine months or so is out May 5th - seriously, labels, talk to each other once in a while - is as usual a whirlwind of whooping, almost speaking-in-tongues chanting and looped percussion, the propulsion and call-and-response structure at least initially sounding like a modernising of those early rock and roll sock hops of a Clapping Song/Iko Iko bent. That's just the sound of it before gradually building up steam, though, with Garbus dropping in plaintively sung snippets alluding to "blood soaked dollar" and "watching us til we're gone". 4AD's video perhaps inevitably doesn't focus on those bits.




Lykke Li - No Rest For The Wicked

Another album out May 5th is I Never Learn, increasingly seeming to be Lykke attempting to reinvent herself as showstopping torch singer. There's a little more to this track than Love Me Like I'm Not Made of Stone, as posted a couple of weeks ago, but it still sounds set in a vast desolate space with Li lost in her rawest of emotional letdowns.




Marika Hackman - Call Off The Dogs

Another pained, spare second emission/escape from a haunted return, this one the Deaf Heat EP out April 14th. Hackman seems haunted by the indefinable, the backing drifts serenely through the woods at night.




School Of Language - Dress Up

David Brewis' continuing investigations into white northern funk lead him into something almost freeze-dried, falsetto and wired to the mains around its edges like Lynx exhumed and given a faulty autopsy. Old Fears is out April 7th.

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