New Music Weekly #10 | Kendrick Lamar, Woods & Mac DeMarco
New Music Weekly is your one stop shop for new releases in the world of music each and every week. From the best of the best, to some of the rest, Mark Conroy is here to give you the low down on what you might have missed. This week; Kendrick Lamar( AGAIN?!), Woods, Mac DeMarco and more
Girlpool ‘It Gets More Blue’
Girlpool’s sophomore record is shaping up to be a special piece of scuzzy joy. Excellent Lead Single ‘123’ was a hard hitting head banger that sounded like how a toxic relationship feels, both the highs and the inevitable lows. Now they’ve followed it up with the conspicuously titled ‘It gets more blue’. The track’s Melancholic fuzz anchors the girl’s seemingly cruel apathy. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that heartache isn’t a good look. They were right, it does get more blue.
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Woods ‘Bleeding Blue’
Last week we had Kevin Morby, this week we have one of his former bands. The surreal rock traditionalists dropped their second single from their upcoming LP Love is Love. The Album was supposedly written in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, but ‘Bleeding Blue’ sounds like a mission statement to say they are not wallowing in despair. Instead, what we heard is a triumphant rally cry, a gorgeous and deeply sincere ode to resistance full of admittedly sappy notions (“If we want love/hate cant stay”) and battle-ready trumpets.
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The XX ‘A Violent Noise (Four Tet Remix)’
Four Tet’s remix of one of I See You’s stronger efforts is made for the dance floor, not the headphones, but it sounds scintillating in both venues. It’s old school trance that tantalises and teases in equal measure. Four Tet does away with the vocals that graced the original track, but his own voice more than makes up for it. The moody melancholy of The XX is transformed into a gentle, groovy euphoria.
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MacDemarco ‘On the Level’
With its sedated synths and languid tranquillity, Mac De Marco’s latest is deeply reminiscent of past effort ‘Chamber of Reflection’. Whereas that song was a bitter piece of lovelorn self-introspection, ‘On the Level’ is a more meditative piece of self-reflection. Mac is now at an age where he can see the world from his father’s perspective when he was a child; De Marco is now ‘on his level’ so to speak. Suddenly he’s left to bare the torch of his family name and the realisation of responsibility leaves him with nowhere to hide: “Carrying a name / Fall until my final day / Now who’s there left to blame?”
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Kendrick Lamar ‘Loyalty (Ft Rihanna)’
I promise not to put Kendrick Lamar in every week, but you’re going to have to tell him to stop dominating the zeitgeist and musical blogosphere for fortnights on end. For all you subterranean rock dwellers who are visiting the world wide web for the first time, let me tell you….go back to where you came from and never return, it’s much better there trust me. If you decided against that then let me also let tell you that K-Dot’s DAMN came out on Friday, and it’s the next best thing to getting off this rock. To be honest, I pretty much just threw a dart at a wall and picked the Rihanna featuring ‘Loyalty’ because I had to pick something, but the whole LP is untouchable. The production is darkly frantic and Kendrick sounds that bit more mellow than on previous records, but this only makes his rage induced ruminations sound even more sagacious. He’s still angry, but this time he’s above it all, looking down at the masses and seeing what we don’t want to see.
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Conor C ‘Little & Often’
Of all the things Kildare may be known for nationally, a thriving dance music scene perhaps isn’t one of them. The newly established 045 recordings set out to right that wrong. The label of sorts represents artists from the region—045 being many of the musicians’ mutual area code—to being some much-needed attention to a relatively unknown, burgeoning electronic scene. 045 recordings will be putting out a compilation of their active artists entitled EP 045 One on April 21st and on the 22nd there will be a launch night at the LUMO CLUB. We’ve already heard Phare‘s ethereal trance ‘Nighttime’ but this week Conor C stepped in the fore with his IDM infused number ‘Little & Often’.
Hoops ‘On Letting Go’
Listening to Hoops is like finding that small pocket of sunshine in a park green that’s mostly shade. The radiant glow of the seemingly lo-fi indie of ‘On letting Go’ has a warmth that never wanes throughout its 3 and a half minutes. The track takes the feathery languor of Real Estate and adds a spoonful of woozy psychedelics to its mix. No wonder they’re letting go, when they sound this free.
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Adult Mom ‘Tenderness’
The affably endearing indie rock of Adult Mom is like Frankie Cosmos with a bit of oomph. Their second single of their upcoming album Soft Spots is a sweet as it is short. The two minutes of ‘Tenderess’ is essentially a document of being able to swallow one’s pride to accepts another’s love. Front woman Stephanie Knipe has the cracking delivery reminiscent of The Cranberries that makes her devotion sound hard earned.
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Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie ‘In My World’
The two members of Fleetwood Mac have banded together outside of their usual group and recorded an album together. In quite inventive fashion, it will be called Lindsey Buckigham / Christine McVie and it will be out in June. Their debut single isn’t really promising much however. The chorus is a gentle rush, but McVie’s heavily produced vocals sound like she’s singer from the depths of the ocean. Buckingham also gives a cloying, somehow atonal riff that he must be quite proud of, because it makes its way through the whole song.
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Father John Misty ‘Things it would be helpful to know before the revolution’
The laziest and most myopic thing you could say about Father John Misty’s new record is that it’s a “post-trump” album. Firstly, many of the songs were in the pipeline well before last November and secondly, Joshua Tillman is smart enough to understand that the neo-liberal status quo had its problems long before the rise of that orange personification of ego. Pure Comedy highlight ‘Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution’ is like a grocery list of the terrifying and blindingly obvious consequences we’ve been gearing up to enduring for years. As the capitalist machine collapses, Tillman predicts a world where “The gears of progress halted/ The underclass set free /The super-ego shatters with our ideologies”. Our Narrator would be horrified, if he couldn’t help but laugh.
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