There aren't really the right superlatives in human dialects to describe Bjork, which is fitting since she is the type of artist that makes everyone wonder if they're really human at all. Similarly to the much-missed Bowie and Prince, Bjork is a creative force so fierce and unstoppable, so relentlessly progressive she appears to be a visitor from another, infinitely more beautiful, realm.
She's back with a new video The Gate, created in collaboration with
Gucci’s Alessandro Michele and artist Andrew Thomas Huang.
It's predictably brilliant and brilliantly unpredictable.
Bjork has told Dazed magazine it's about "rediscovering love, but in a spiritual way - for lack of a better word". Perhaps the love of a mother for their child? I can't be sure, but the ball of energy that enters and leaves her abdomen at regular intervals throughout the video and the plaintive call of 'I will care for you' certainly give that impression. It's deeply touching, and technically, artistically mesmerising. She is a true auteur, her art light years beyond most of our comprehension. Her collaborators, aforementioned and also the ridiculously talented producer Arca, deserve great credit too. The sound design, the imagery, the sparsity, the songwriting: Majestic. Without compare. Scintillating. Stultifying. See? I really need some new superlatives.
Bjork's new album, procuced by Arca, is out soon on One Little Indian.
If Stevie Wonder, Pharrel and Public Enemy were taken hostage by Sun-Ra, Mogwai and Mike Patten, forced to spend a decade devoid of outside contact in a Fritzl-esque cellar, and then forced to record an album, it would sound exactly like this. Exactly. Like. This. I fucking guarantee it.
Following on from assured sophomore release Time, Jackson deliver on their unquestionable promise with new record Push Through.
Building on what is becoming a signature sound, the band, helmed by Jack Baldus, combine world-class musicianship with the kind of relentless creativity that can be as demanding as it is invigorating. Songs swerve violently, lurch and crash through their arrangements; yet every step is deliberate and meticulously performed. Influences and styles coalesce like battery hens, each one fracturing into a mix that defies categorisation; an amnesiac captivated by an unplaced reminiscence; something sinister; something sweet. Golden eggs indeed.
The band are led by songwriter, keyboard-wizard and lyricist Jack Baldus, whose increasingly impressive list of credits include work with Sure Thing. DJ Die, J. Morrison and Laid Blak. Joining him is regular vocalist O.Love, AKA 5 times DMC UK scratch champion DJ Asian Hawk, who combines sharp cuts, choice samples and impassioned vocal performances. This combo are the brains trust, behind which come the exceptional talents of a band of semi-regulars on session duty across drum, guitar, and brass instruments... including Gary Alesbrook on trumpet, he of Kasabian fame.
I could list the influences I hear in the record, but that would do a disservice to the composer, Jack Baldus. His uncompromising dedication to creating his own sound is clearly the driving force here. If you had to classify, you'd call this a jazz-funk-prog fusion record, akin to those the likes of Stanley Clarke gave to the 70s. Yet there's something Punk about the refusal to water down arrangements for modern audiences. I'll explain. Punk itself was a violent backlash against the proggy, jazzy sounds of the 70s that irked a generation of upstarts who wanted their music to stand for something, and saw the beardy prog bands as the preserve of a snobby upper-class. These days, music is most often delivered in soundbites; easily digestible simplicity set to a checklist of tired tropes. A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a song without the word 'tonight' in the chorus!
The received wisdom is this: Audiences are over-saturated, over-stimulated and under-educated. The steady dumbing-down of modern radio since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has had its desired* effect, and the audience clamours for More Of The Same.
Of course, that's not the whole story, and the internet has enabled the proliferation of new styles and sounds, but the audience has dwindled. Represses outsell new records on wax and Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift outsell everyone by a ratio of approximately 10000:1
There is simply no common-sense in a self-funded, self-employed professional musician with only a modest fanbase putting themselves through the agonies and ecstasies of creating a band, recording and gigging when it's one as wildly inventive and academic as Jackson.
By railing against this received wisdom, Jackson'sPush Through delivers a record that might just remind you why you fell in love with music in the first place. You deserve music with passion. You deserve music that aspires to be the best. You deserve songs that mean something to the writer. You deserve Push Through.
*That's a whole other story, but if you're interested in how the Telecommunications Act affected diversity in the musical landscape, I recommend this illuminating report
“Greetings. My name is Mr Teatime. I am contacting you from the year 2074. The World is now a very different place. After the bomb dropped the robots took control. Please heed my warning.
I am so alone.”
Back in the days of yore, releases like this would have got a short run vinyl pressing, and, having achieved cult status 30 years on, original copies would fetch ludicrous sums, leading to a Record Store Day repress. This is 2015, though, and precious few labels can afford the risk of pressing to wax, even when the output deserves it.
The Scribes Mr Teatime and the end of the World is a staggeringly original work from my long time buddies. (Yes, I'm blogging things my mates have done. Fuck you, get your own blog!)
I've been lucky enough to share the stage with them on many occasions, filling in as scratch DJ and occasionally performing the tracks Shaun and I wrote for my last album (plug). Must be at least 7 years' of shows, on and off. In that time I've seen them develop immensely. They have always had a ridiculously infectious stage presence - something which has actively alienated them from the UK Hip-Hop scene at times, because, you know, you're meant to shuffle about like a paranoid recluse - but over the years their finished product has become ever more polished.
They've earned a rep for being 'the kind of hip-hop you'd like if you liked indie most of the time', which has opened up doors to less traditional audiences. That rep sounds like a back-handed compliment, and to hip-hop purists, it is... but it's really served them well, and given them the courage to push boundaries in terms of sound and lyrical content. There's always been a kind of mawkish malevolence about the lyrics and delivery, without ever going full-Necro, which marries nicely to bouncy beats that encourage dancing and a range of lyrical topics from monstrous fantasies to positive affirmations about the inherent beauty of life.
This release is, I suggest, a line in the sand. The same malevolence flows through each track, but gone is the almost histrionic delivery, replaced with a brooding, battle-scarred baritone... a grown up sound for a messed up world. It's basically Utopia: The Musical, or a 'hip-hopera' as the act have called it. In truth, concept albums don't always fare as well on record as they do on paper. This one fares better. The biggest triumph is that the sound wins over the concept. Crisp, deliberate beats punch through mechanical, retro basslines and glimmering, glitchy sound effects. It sounds like it comes from a dystopian future decimated by nuclear war, with only rudimentary tools and a battered MPC 2000 available to make music with. Which, when you've called your album Mr Teatime and the end of the World, must go down as a success. More than simply scoring a direct hit conceptually, the record's plaintive lament from 2074 has something to say to us in 2015... who hasn't watched the news over the last few years and not felt a creeping dread at the impending doom we seem to be accelerating towards?
This is the soundtrack to its aftermath.
