A look at some essential February releases featuring Squid, Sheepish, HONESTY, Conus sp. Bent, Hachiku and Richard Dawson.
Squid – ‘Cowards’
Back with their third album, we find Squid at their most expansive on ‘Cowards’. Krautrock-inspired jams have always been a unique highlight of the band’s live shows, and on this record, it is these winding instrumentals that steal the show, with less of a focus put on jerky post-punk of the singles that first broke the band. The churning rhythm that has been a Squid signature survives on tracks like ‘Building 650’ but is met with something new. Typified by opener ‘Crispy Skin’ and ‘Fieldworks I’ in particular, the album’s textures have a postindustrialist shimmer to them, a little like James Ferraro, a little like the glint of sunlight on thirty storeys of glass. Complimenting this, the sparseness of ‘Blood on the Boulders’ proves a highlight as the group’s sound is splayed over a slow Californian gothic narrative with a tense sparsity. (Lloyd Bolton)
Sheepish – ‘Goodbye Lemon’ EP
The debut EP from London five-piece Sheepish is at once charmingly accessible and wickedly inventive. The collection is filled with grooves worthy of Orange Juice at their most dancefloor-oriented, in this sense also reminiscent of early Vampire Weekend in moments of multifaceted yet elementally appealing rhythm. Songwriter Charlie Bowles does a good job on vocals of mixing sincerity with tongue-in-cheek riffs like “I would like to pay off your tax, file your returns” (on highlight ‘Little Bit Older’), recalling in his pert Britishness the delivery of Honeyglaze’s Anouska Sokolow and Teleman’s Thomas Sanders. ‘I Can Dance’ is also typical of this narrattion, Bowles singing, with a voice that could be serious or self-deprecating, “I can dance! Like David Bowie! He could dance!” Just where you think you have the EP pinned, somewhere between post-punk funk and Postcard indie, it pulls away again, concluding with the winding ‘Wait’, which creates a blissful space among the twiddling guitars and anxious vocals that are the key components of Sheepish’s music. This collection has a wholeness rarely found in a debut EP, leading one to suspect that whatever follows this self-released debut could well come via whichever label is smart enough to snap this band up first. (Lloyd Bolton)
HONESTY – ‘U R HERE’
Describing themselves as “not a band in a traditional sense”, Leeds collective HONESTY seek to redraw the boundaries of club music on their immersive debut album ‘U R HERE’, released this month via Partisan Records. Steeped in a brooding, birds-eye introspection that draws its lifeforce from the inversely gregarious, sweat-dowsed pulse of the dancefloor, the record ripples through an array of familiar stylistic influences spanning Kelela to Mount Kimbie. From vocalist Imi Marston’s woozy incantations on propulsive standout ‘MEASURE ME’, to the manifold of unique perspectives furnished by the record’s various featured artists throughout its 45-minute runtime, it is both a sense of collaborative spirit and uninhibited creative curiosity that render ‘R U HERE’ a rich and promising debut. (Hazel Blacher)
Conus sp. Bent – ‘To Within an Inch’
‘To Within an Inch’ is the second album in two years from Conus sp. Bent, aka Alex Goodall (also of Kissing Gate and Dog). Released on Tapir!’s My Life Is Big imprint, the collection is filled with idiosyncratic delights. Twinkling melodic guitars and pastoral strings speak of the spiritual closeness of contemporaries like Tapir! and The Last Whole Earth Catalog, while incredible bass riffs, DIY electronics and rambling narrations push the songs into a territory uniquely their own. At times, especially on ‘Well Met’, one feels the parallel of an album like XTC’s ‘English Settlement’, though the similarity primarily stems from a determination to sound original, mingled with a comparable observation of the English mundane. With songs inspired by journal entries, memories of Old Grey Whistle Test reruns and Goodall’s late dog Fraiser, the collection upholds an unfailing sense of intimacy even when its music sets out to deliberately wrongfoot the listener. (Lloyd Bolton)
Hachiku – ‘The Joys of Being Pure At Heart’
An sweet, defiantly uncynical record, as the title suggests, this second album is a welcome return from Hachiku, the Melbourne-based DIY alt-pop artist who first came to our notice as part of the golden years of Courtney Barnett’s Milk! Records. Here, Hachiku combines her charming DIY quality with an ability to assimilate all kinds of references, fusing structures more typical of acid house and electronica with arrangements more comparable to her previous bedroom indie releases. ‘Do You Like What You See In Me’ is a particular highlight of the record and we can’t wait to see it performed live when she comes over to the UK this May. (Lloyd Bolton)
Richard Dawson – ‘End of the Middle’
Though Richard Dawson is undoubtedly a masterful songwriter, his new album ‘End of the Middle’ does not quite catch him at his best, its construction bounding it from reaching the heights other collections have hit. Designed around the loose idea of capturing a family’s life through nine vignettes, and partly inspired by Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, ‘End of the Middle’ ultimately gets bogged down in its re-examination of the same repeated ideas and images from song to song. Clever techniques, like, for example, the juxtaposition of real-world domestic drama with the untrammelled flow of daytime television, lose their shine as they recur without revision (compare ‘Bolt’ with ‘Gondola’, or similarly ‘Boxing Day Sales’ with ‘Knot’). There are some good individual songs here, but perhaps it is telling that the standout, ‘The Question’, is one of only two that breaks through and reflects upon its more mundane details by setting them against the ambiguity of the supernatural (all while building around an astounding ascending guitar riff). (Lloyd Bolton)