Hi, and welcome to “ Plays Discover Weekly, “ where I log the music that’s new — to me! — on occasion. I’d like to do this each week, but, knowing my own aversion to routine and regularity, this may or may not happen. Anyway:
Genre: Ambient/experimental
Release year: 2024
Four minimalist tracks spaced out over an hour, from somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. The music moves slowly, but it keeps a driving tension through how skewed its movements are. “Recur” cascades over the same motif for ten minutes in a limbo state — never quite landing, never quite resolving, but undulating around a resolution for its entire duration. Then, on “Temper,” clarinets rise and fall over drones, amorphous, dreamlike, but not a comfortable dream. There’s some uncomfortable sterility here — mostly on account of a repeating, semi-regular two note-pulse resembling a heart rate monitor that increases in frequency throughout the track’s duration.
I get the same feeling from this album that I get from Ravel’s Bolero: it’s a somewhat violent experiment in repetition, a stillness that comes in the wake of something terrible.
Genre: Electronic soul
Release year: 2024
I’m still digesting this one, which came out on Friday. “Mood To Make Love” is one of the greatest singles I’ve heard this year — a simple, speakeasy-esque piano line is all that underscores most of Lowe’s harmonies, which float through the lines in an easy, confident haze. The tracks are mostly quite short and disconnected from each other, each taking a single idea and embodying it for a moment before jumping to whatever idea is next. The drums on “In My Head” resemble something out of Frank Ocean’s Blonde, with the vocal progressions calling to mind for me some of the interlude tracks from that album (think “Close To You,” “Good Guy”). Then right after comes “Bezerk,” bordering on straight-up glitchy, punctuated with sharp, staccato vocal melodies that make themselves as short as possible.
It’s a fun listen that I think demands a bit of attention. It jumps in a bunch of different directions, each track a tightly bound, isolated idea.
Genre: Ambient Release year: 2021
Anything Oliver Coates touches turns to gold. Which isn’t to discredit what Clark has put together here — just that I found this album while digging around for every project Coates has ever been featured on.
This album uses distortion to a similar effect as some of Tim Hecker’s projects: it projects some distant, inaccessible somewhere else, somewhere you once knew but can’t return to. The album name and cover, along with the track titles (“Forever Chemicals,” “Suspension Reservoir,” “Already Ghosts,” etc., etc.) further this effect. But what separates this, I think, is this album’s comfort indulging in the joy of that Somewhere Else — “Lambent Rag,” in three short minutes, builds to a place of downright exuberance, with the next track, “Citrus,” not quite giving in to the fuzzy fragmentation that dominates the back half of the album. Whereas I think a lot of ambient albums focus on painting a single image, capturing a single moment in time and space, this one instead has a distinct progression that shows you the path you took to end up at that image.
Genre: Electronic experimental
Release year: 2024
Industrial sounds that stab instead of crush. I haven’t listened to this one enough to do any sort of sophisticated writeup, but this is another fragmented album, jumping between sounds and styles without much of a care. The percussion and melodies take turns indulging in a sort of franticness, clashing against each other and creating bursts of energy through those clashes.
Genre: Post-hardcore
Release year: 2024
New Hidden Mothers single! This band isn’t quite up my alley when it comes to heavy music — their production is just a bit too clean for my tastes — but this track does some cool things. It plods along with concrete solidity, but maintains enough variation to keep itself fresh. The breakdown about two minutes in lingers just as long as it needs to, and not a moment more. And the final 90 seconds make for a masterful outro, taking a short guitar line that appears just once earlier in the song and fleshing it out as the focal point of a new progression.
This band does cool things, and I’m excited for their upcoming album, Erosion / Avulsion, releasing on November 29.
Genre: Alt-rock
Release year: 1999
Heard this one on the radio the other day and couldn’t get it out of my head. There’s just such a simple reminiscent glee in this song, nostalgia without bitterness. A dainty little piano line dances beneath Strummer’s lyric wanderings, which have their fair share of fun, self-indulgent flair: there’s the overenunciated assonance of the repeated line “All the Aussie lagers are on me,” and then the dragging out of the end of the line “Your old mother, she wants a stout.” I think this is sort of unembittered happiness is underexplored in music; this song does it well. You might recognize Strummer’s name as the vocalist from The Clash — this is like if you took "London Calling" and said “alright, now take all of your feelings about this place and give them the happiest possible interpretation.”