The label’s flagship compilation series returns with an inspiring, multi-genre selection of some of the most challenging and brilliant new voices in alternative music.
Slow Dance Records’ annual compilation is a trusted barometer of the state of things to come in alternative music, alternative in as many facets as that can apply. Down the years, it has platformed debuts and diversions from the likes of Lynks, Goat Girl, Black Country, New Road and Platonica Erotica, often favouring the most unusual experiments from an artist. This year’s compilation brings together a mixture of brand-new names whose nascent sets are being caught only by a rapt few, placed alongside artists of more repute within Slow Dance’s orbit, such as Ash Kenazi, Export Import, GG Skips & heka, and as well as other exciting additions, an example being the appearance of 80s experimentalist Princess Demeny.
Through the years, this compilation series has encapsulated the diverse range of styles being forged by new artists and finding within that the underlying notes of consistency. This album certainly seems to possess that quality, bringing together a mixture of folk, jazz, electronic and rock elements. Openers from Wing! And Pearl2 particuarly represent bands taking advantage of the blurring boundary between live guitar music and synthetic electronica, enabled by a free-thinking assimilation of the latest accessible music technologies. With ‘Pack It In’, Wing! echo the thick facture of Seefeel and also something of the lounge revival eclecticism of Solex and Laika. Pearl2, the collaboration between members of Hank and Moreish Idols, lean more into the impossibilities of purely synthetic beats, but constantly underwrite this with human elements like sloshing live drums to chanting vocals.
The compilation also represents some exciting new voices in songwriting, and in this sense the next two songs by xmal and Birdfeeder form respective highlights. xmal’s ‘Doorstep’ has a great Liz Phair languidity, creating space for a liberated artistic expression that could be read as devotional or sarcastic. On ‘One Shot’, Birdfeeder drawls over an unusually trilling bassline, rambling lyrics taking on that diaristic style that can be the victory of indie songwriting. The project is a solo offshoot from Tom Gray Phillips of Most Things, who recently launched with the similarly irreverent single ‘Shops!’. Esme Creed-Miles is another exciting newcomer, having recently beguiled audiences as part of live duo Cusk. ‘Latchkey’ has something of the wounded perceptiveness of Sarah Meth, as well as some of the biting melancholic observation of Ellie Bleach.
KITTY provides one of the best tender moments on this album, ‘Matchstick’ revolving around a folky melody and steady piano recorded with a roughness that invests it with a dreamlike, closing time quality. Indeed, this collection as a whole brings to mind a concept put forward by two of Slow Dance’s founders, Marco Pini and Maddy O’Keefe, in an interview several years ago, of a new strain of ‘post-club’ indie music, inspired by the experience of afterparties, last buses home, and wall-eyed comedowns. It is in this context that ‘Matchstick’ can sit naturally alongside Luke Thompson’s ‘Dust and Scratches’, which follows it on the record and recalls Boards of Canada at their most essential. This track in turn runs into Wildwood Daddy’s ‘O’, produced in collaboration with Louis Gardner. The song is also representative of the folk influence pervading the scene, its melody suggestive of Wildwood Daddy’s oft-cited influence Jean Ritchie. For this piece, however, the tune is slowed to a pace that wrings every line for its pain and pathos. Squealing violin compliments the picture, before carving out a beautiful melody that elevates the song to a place of cathartic transcendence.
The point of these albums is to reflect a dazzling cross section of new music, pushing in all kinds of directions at once. Each song opens out onto a world of other artists and ideas. heka’s collaboration with GG Skips (aka Slow Dance’s Marco Pini, alos of Sorry, Glows and more recently R.I.P. Magic) brings together the disparate sonic worlds of these artists into a magical synthesis, abstracted vocals lending it an otherworldly quality anchored again by a fusion of synthetic and acoustic instruments. Princess Demeny’s ‘How Did You Get In That Chair?’ is a sound-art piece that marks the artist’s first work in 30 years. This mutating, unpredictable piece connects the album to an avant-garde lineage that is older than some of the artists featured. She provokes as much with her cut-up music as with her lyrics, familiar yet abstractly alarming and in that sense reminiscent also of Laurie Anderson. Opening up another world, Export Import, a band heavily partial to the development of elaborate lore, contribute the uniquely sinister ‘Love Island’. its exotica strings and sliding palm tree guitars upset by disjointed vocals and uncanny noise elements, administered with enough restraint to suggest genuine evil rather than formal gimmick.
Elsewhere, Vogues’ ‘Cold Summer Nights’ combines the revisionist rock ‘n’ roll longing of Ezra Furman with a twittering synth palette, while Ash Kenazi makes a latest transformation with the idiosyncratic single ‘William Orbit’, which combines great melodic hooks with subtle flashes of Kenazi’s operatic talents. Though its hour-ten length does not make for the easiest start-to-finish listen, the collection is filled with gems that stand up just as well in isolation, perhaps part of the label’s logic in releasing each track one day at a time in the build-up to the full album. For a rough guide to some of the most challenging and exciting new directions of modern music, look no further than Slow Dance ’24.