Alt rock – Page 14 – 7th Level Music

The Go! Team announce sixth album with new single, “World Remember Me Now.”

The Go! Team’s debut LP, 2004’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike, is an album that had a transformative effect on independent music, a release Pitchfork describes as “an ear-ringing sugar buzz that energized a generation of previously fun-averse indie fans.” In the years since The Go! Team have never let up, releasing 4 more albums of innovative, danceable, sample-based music while steadily evolving a sound that has an omnivorous appetite for tones, textures, styles and genres, combining and re-combining disparate building blocks into a sound that is always, undeniably The Go! Team. Today, the band are announcing their 6th LP. Get Up Sequences Part One, set to be released via Memphis Industrieson July 2nd, and sharing the album’s first single “World Remember Me Now,” a song that provides a tantalizing hint of an album that it sure to be a bright light of this summer and of the band’s catalog.

WATCH: to The Go! Team’s “World Remember Me Now” on YouTube

Performed by long time Go! Team lead vocalist Ninja and members of the Kansas City Girls Choir, “World Remember Me Now” is about feeling forgotten in the modern world. From the opening alarm clock, the lyrics take the structure of a day in the life of a woman in a big city: “Pour the Orange Juice and Check the Post, Flip the Calendar and Pop the Toast”. “I’ve always been interested in people’s daily routines – what people do all day” says Go! Team songwriter Ian Parton. “It was written ages ago but has become strangely relevant to the world now. It’s easy to feel forgotten at the moment”.

While the album is a burst of positivity from the band, the recording of the album was a tough process for Go! Team leader Ian Parton, who began losing his hearing while working on the album.

“I lost hearing in my right ear halfway during the making of this record” Parton explains. “I woke up one Thursday in October 2019 and my hearing was different in some way – it fluctuated over a few weeks and at one point everything sounded like a Dalek. I seem to remember listening to music was bordering on unbearable. Over time it settled into just a tiny bit of hi end being audible on my right side. I thought the hearing loss was from playing music too loud over the years but it turns out I was just unlucky and it was a rare condition called Menieres. It was traumatic to keep listening to songs I knew well but which suddenly sounded different and it was an odd juxtaposition to listen to upbeat music when I was on such a downer. The trauma of losing my hearing gave the music a different dimension for me and it transformed the album into more of a life raft.”

Read more on the background of the album and the band from DJ, film maker, The Clash cinematographer and Big Audio Dynamite member Don Letts below:

Twenty one seconds, that’s all it took – actually rewind that ‘cause I was hooked by the first 15 such was the impact of ‘Let The Seasons Work’ the veritable statement of intent that is the opening track of The Go! Teams latest album ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’ and once I’d stepped through that door I definitely wanted more….

With echoes of the past, their avalanche of sound first caught my ear with ‘Power is On’ from 2004’s ’Thunder, Lightning, Strike’ which sampled a clip from my Clash film ‘Westway to The World’. I was struck by their use of the obscure – something that didn’t go unnoticed by this ex-member of Mick Jones second band Big Audio Dynamite. But here’s the thing – on further investigation it was clear to hear there was more going on than a clever use of samples n’ loops – ‘cause if you took ‘em away you still had kickass songs and that was always the B.A.D acid test. The album was a great introduction to an outfit I’ve been a fan of from that time till this. Further exploration led to the revelation it was primarily the vision of one man, musical ringmaster Ian Parton – accompanied by a co-ed team of players to push that vision further. I also came to recognise Ian’s ability to see the beauty and the possibilities of the amateur and the naive. Armed with these attributes they delivered Proof of Youth The Go! Team’s second album in 2007 n’ that took things to another level with guest vocals from the likes of the Double Dutch Divas and Public Enemy‘s Chuck D. For 2011’s ‘Rolling Blackouts’ the band’s cut n’ paste approach was supplemented by a cast of thousands, some regular some not to deliver a bunch of satisfying songs that sampled the likes of Harry Nilsson, Lata Mangeshkar n’ Joe Tex along way. By way of contrast and in the wake of a band break up 2015’s ‘The Scene Between’ would see a return to the stripped back beginnings of the debut album. But at the heart of what was an undoubtedly more sampled driven outing were those, by now familiar, melody driven hooks. In 2018 ‘Semicircle’ knocked it out of the park, teaming up with a community choir in Detroit, Michigan.

And now on ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’ Ian, Ninja, Nia, Simone, Sam and Adam have created a musical world distinctly of their own making. A place where routine is outlawed and perfection is the enemy. Where Ennio Morricone meets the Monkees armed with flutes, glockenspiels, steel drums and a badass analogue attitude. We’re talking widescreen, four-track, channel hopping sounds that are instantly recognisable.

In The Go! Team’s world old’s cool, the future’s bright and melody is the star….

Just check the second cut COOKIE SCENE – with a bouncing flute and junk shop percussion it introduces guest rapper Indigo Yaj who delivers an old school vocal that continues this sonic trip. Next stop the harmonica driven northern soul groove that is A MEMO FOR MACEO, an instrumental for your thoughts to become lyrics and turn your life into a movie. In WE DO IT BUT NEVER KNOW WHY matters of the heart get a look in albeit with a Go! Team twist that sees trumpets ask the questions and steel drums give the answer. Just as FREEDOM NOW comes bursting through the gates with an OMG instrumental jam that’ll blow out your speakers. Now if you wanna loose your shit this next cuts it – with a chorus channeling Curtis Mayfield, enter the inimitable Ninja with POW and you don’t stop, you wont stop to this flute driven free for all. By way of demonstrating the ringmaster’s passion for those old’s cool vocals combined with his ‘needle-in-the-red’ recording technique comes I LOVED YOU BETTER a defiant message to an ex love, spelling out exactly how he’s fucked up – and then there’s those steel drums. Following that some soda fountain soulcourtesy of A BEE WITHOUT ITS STING, a groovy protest song that makes its point with a tambourine – hey only The Go! Team. The musical wagon train then takes you into the wide screen, wind swept western that is TAME THE GREAT PLAINS heading off into a polyrhythmic panorama that’s full of hope. Slappin’ you back to reality comes WORLD REMEMBER ME NOW a timely reminder that when you’re lost in the routine of life,you can always count on The Go! Team.

The sum total of my listening experience was that the band came through on their opening musical promise to deliver that most rare of works – a complete one. Using ingredients available to everyone they manage to sound like no one – they are The Go! Team and if ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’ doesn’t hit you like it hit me, check yr pulse – you might be dead.

– Don Letts

“World Remember Me Now” is out now on Memphis Industries. Get Up Sequences Part One is out on July 2nd on Memphis Industries. Pre-order from their store here.

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Museum of Love take on our “Cluttered World” with their new single.

Museum Of Love – the New York-based duo of Pat Mahoney and Dennis McNany – returns with new single “Cluttered World” on Skint Records. Produced by the duo and mixed by James Murphy (DFA / LCD Soundsystem), “Cluttered World” is a super-futuristic torch song — it takes you by the hand and leads you down, down into a subterranean basement, all thick air and close heat. It pulls up a stool somewhere between the grand piano and the quaking bass bins and sets you right in the heart of the action. It’s a wild and disorientating place, yet it’s one you’ll want to return to again and again each time the drum track stops. “The song is about labor in the 21st century, and drifting and sifting through the hyper-abundance of our so called civilization,” explains Museum Of Love.

Stream “Cluttered World”

Mahoney, founder and drummer of LCD Soundsystem, and McNany, known for his production work as Jee Day, formed Museum Of Love in 2013 and released their lauded self-titled debut the following year. “Cluttered World” is their first taste of new music to come later this year.

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Kalbells release dreamy new single, “Diagram of Me Sleeping,” ahead of full album due March 26th.

Kalbells—the collaborative synth/art-pop project of Kalmia Traver, Angelica Bess, Sarah Pedinotti, and Zoë Brecher—today shared their dreamy new single, “Diagram of Me Sleeping”, from the upcoming full-length, Max Heart, releasing March 26 via NNA Tapes.

Each track from Max Heart excavates love and creativity from a new and surprising ventricle of life—and “Diagram” fits right in as a lofty ode to sleep, brought to reality with jazzy bedroom-pop melodies, swoony sax, and playfully surreal lyricism. Traver explains how the song came to fruition: “I woke up one morning and my legs felt relaxed and pillowy like two lovers tangled together in mindless warmth and it was pleasant beyond the sensical and I wrote this song. I’ve come to crave sleep almost like love itself. Sleep is where so much of our creativity happens, in dreams & in the spaces between them. I love thinking of my body as a landscape, and sleep is the time I get to roam it freely.”

Traver adds about the recording/mixing process: “I especially loved tracking drums & bass on this recording. We were recording straight to tape at Outlier Inn in the Catskills and the sounds we were getting for Zoë & Sarah were sending shivers up our spines, we were prancing around all giddy. I mixed Max Heart (my first time mixing an album! – I taught myself the skill of mixing during the initial covid quarantine, alone for 4 months in my apartment NYC) and mixing this song was so easy because the sounds we got were so good and the song was simple. It was very satisfying and created a blueprint for mixing the rest of the record.”

The sophomore album from Kalbells, illustrates the formidable love Kalmia Traver (Rubblebucket) discovered with her touring band turned bandmates. Together, Angelica Bess (Giraffage, Body Language), Zoë Becher (Hushpuppy, Sad13), Sarah Pedinotti (Okkervil River, LipTalk) and Traver, practice both listening and accountability, rejoicing in their queerness, and promoting each other to be their most genuine selves. The result is Max Heart—ten vibrant and subtly layered tracks of mesmerizing psychedelic synth-pop. Common groove language is a rare medicine to happen across, which is why, as a group, playing together has been not only exciting, but healing. Max Heart harnesses this magnetic power for a collection of songs that are packed with inspired tension and daring surreality. Read the full bio here.

Max Heart is available to pre-order on standard black & “Salty Pickle” green vinyl, as well as on compact disc and digital formats here. The album will be available on “Red Marker” red vinyl exclusively from local indie record stores.

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Current Joys releases “Amateur” ahead of new album due May 14th.

Current Joys – the project of Nick Rattigan – announces signing to Secretly Canadian for its seventh album, Voyager, to be released May 14th, and shares the first single/video, “Amateur.” Voyager rattles with the live-wire feeling that’s thrummed through all of Rattigan’s previous releases: quavering, scream-itself-hoarse vocals and self-interrogation via song. But here, that bristling, sentimental rock ‘n’ roll cacophony is overlaid with a soundtrack orchestra guiding it along. It’s an odyssey, a grand-sounding journey of self-discovery spread across sixteen tracks. Part ekphrasis, part personal, it’s Rattigan learning new ways to understand his own feelings and identity while inspired by the highly-stylized, striking storytelling of filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Lars Von Trier, Terrence Malick, Agnès Varda, and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Voyager, Rattigan’s most mature release to date, is an evolution built on Current Joys’ prolific output since 2013. A Nevada native, Rattigan began Current Joys in Reno, before moving to New York after school and busting his ass working as a production assistant in the film/TV industry. He relocated to Los Angeles in 2016, and the songs that make up Voyager began coming together shortly after. Each piece of Current Joys’ previous discography is wholly built and envisioned by Rattigan, self-recorded and quickly released, quivering with a lonely intensity. Within six months of beginning the project, Current Joys had already released its debut, Wild Heart; by 2018, the sixth Current Joys full length and visual album, A Different Age, was out. All the while, Current Joys’ profile quickly and quietly ascended, selling out venues like LA’s El Rey along with European tours, simultaneously amassing millions of streams of the catalog, and a dedicated following.

On Voyager, Rattigan eschews lo-fi home recordings for a full band and recording sessions at Stinson Beach Studios. As a vocalist/drummer in his other band Surf Curse, Rattigan had finally opened up to the possibility of working in a professional studio. But while the audiences and songwriting/recording approaches changed and continue to evolve for Current Joys, the inspiration Rattigan draws from cinema remains a guiding force. Frequently he uses film as a jumping off point for songwriting. Lead single “Amateur” and its video reflects his affinity for the cinematic. The track is piano-heavy, a slow-build of tension, flitting with prettiness. The self-directed video features Rattigan in costume, chaotically driving a retro car.

Watch “Amateur” Video:
https://youtu.be/0sDWu2ioRqw

Rattigan, who stays up all night to perfect the sequencing of his records once they’re recorded, doesn’t set out with a typical aesthetic in mind – instead, it just happens. Performing is his catharsis. Which feels palpable on Voyager; there’s fragments of hours spent watching movies, as well as stories from his own life; there’s overly-caffeinated car rides blasting the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa; there’s inspiration taken from the crooning presence of frontmen like Jeff Buckley, Chris Isaak, and Nick Cave, as evidenced on Rattigan’s cover of the Boys Next Door’s “Shivers.” And there’s the simple, ecstatic energy of getting a bunch of friends in the studio.

It’s all held together by the fervor of Rattigan’s creative process. He believes in the premonitory power of music, and he latches onto the song ideas that strike him in the moment, propelled by an abstract existentialism or burst of feeling more than anything else. It imbues Voyager with an intensity and intimacy – with the sense that you’re getting to hear, all at once, the disparate parts that make a project – or person – into a sprawling, cinematic whole.
Watch “Amateur” Video:
https://youtu.be/0sDWu2ioRqw

Pre-order Voyager:
https://current-joys.ffm.to/voyager

Voyager Tracklist:
1. Dancer in the Dark
2. American Honey
3. Naked
4. Altered States
5. Breaking the Waves6. Big Star
7. Amateur
8. Rebecca
9. Shivers
10. Something Real
11. Money Making Machine
12. Voyager pt. 1
13. Calypso
14. The Spirit or the Curse
15. Vagabond
16. Voyager pt. 2

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CHAI team up with Ric Wilson for “Maybe Chocolate Chips.”

CHAI photo by Yoshio Nakaiso, Ric Wilson photo by Jackie Lee Young

Japanese quartet CHAI present a new single/video, “Maybe Chocolate Chips” (Feat. Ric Wilson), from their forthcoming album, WINK, due May 21st on Sub Pop. CHAI’s past albums have been filled with playful references, in the lyrics, to food, and WINK’s intimate single “Maybe Chocolate Chips” offers an evolution of this motif. Bassist/lyricist YUUKI wanted to write a self-love song about her moles: “Things that we want to hold on to, things that we wished went away. A lot of things happen as we age and with that for me, is new moles! But I love them! My moles are like the chocolate chips on a cookie, the more you have, the happier you become! and before you know it, you’re an original♡”

Chicago rapper Ric Wilson, who they initially connected with at the 2019 Pitchfork Music Festival, brings smooth vocals over a laidback beat and whirring, dreamy synth. A community activist and artist based on the Southside of Chicago, he got his start with the legendary Young Chicago Authors, the Chicago-based storytelling and poetry organization which helped launch the likes of Noname, Saba, Jamila Woods, Chance The Rapper, Vic Mensa, Mick Jenkins, and many others. He’s also featured in the accompanying video, directed by Callum Scott-Dyson, which is made of fun collages and video clips in classic CHAI style. Ric added: “Super in love with this new song with CHAI, a song about loving yourself & understanding your beautiful no matter what oppressive societal norms are telling you is beautiful. I hope folks can wake up and jam this while they make their coffee, or enjoy just sitting outside an open field. This year we’ve all spent a little more time with ourselves, let’s find the beauty in it.”

CHAI elaborates on the video: “This music video is the perfect visual for ‘Maybe Chocolate Chips.’ It was our first time working with Callum and the result (animation, etc.) was something we’d never tried before! Callum actually reached out to us for this but we loved how his work featured grotesque but cute components and tons of fantasy so our vision for this was in line. ♡⭐️^o^♡ Your mole is actually a Chocolate Chip! But you knew that already right?!♡⭐️♡”

WATCH CHAI’S VIDEO FOR “MAYBE CHOCOLATE CHIPS” (FEAT. RIC WILSON)

CHAI is made up of identical twins MANA (lead vocals and keys) and KANA (guitar), drummer YUNA, and bassist-lyricist YUUKI. Following the release of 2019’s PUNK, CHAI’s adventures took them around the world, playing their high-energy and buoyant shows at music festivals like Primavera Sound and Pitchfork Music Festival, and touring with indie-rock mainstays like Whitney and Mac DeMarco. Like all musicians, CHAI spent 2020 forced to rethink the fabric of their work and lives. But CHAI took this as an opportunity to shake up their process and bring their music somewhere thrillingly new. Having previously used their maximalist recordings to capture the exuberance of their live shows, CHAI instead focused on crafting the slightly-subtler and more introspective kinds of songs they enjoy listening to at home—where, for the first time, they recorded all of the music. They draw R&B and hip-hop into their mix (Mac Miller, the Internet, and Brockhampton were on their minds) of dance-punk and pop-rock, all while remaining undeniably CHAI. While the band leaned into a more personal sound, WINK is also the first CHAI album to feature contributions from outside producers (Mndsgn, YMCK) as well as Ric Wilson. This impulse towards connection with others is in WINK’s title, too. After the “i” of PINK and the “u” of PUNK—which represented the band’s act of introducing themselves, and then of centering their audiences—they have come full circle with the “we” of WINK. It signals CHAI’s relationship with the outside world, an embrace of profound togetherness. Through music, as CHAI said, “we are all coming together.” In that act of opening themselves up, CHAI grew into their best work: “This album showed us, we’re ready to do more.”
WATCH THE “ACTION” VIDEO

WATCH THE “PLASTIC LOVE” VIDEO

WATCH THE “DONUTS MIND IF I DO” VIDEO

PRE-ORDER WINK

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Field Music announce new album, “Flat White,” with release of a new single – “No Pressure.”

Last month, Field Music – the English “national treasures” (NME) composed of Sunderland-born brothers Peter and David Brewis – shared their single “Orion From The Street,” a track which built some considerable excitement among the Field Music-faithful (including their fellow indie veteran The New Pornographers’ AC Newman) about what might becoming next from the band. Ever prolific, the duo have released two full lengths since 2018 that neatly encapsulate the band’s unique approach: a critically-adored new wave-addled art pop LP about Brexit in 2018s Open Here, and a high concept song cycle about the aftermath of the First World War, Making A New World in 2020. Today, the band are announcing their 8th studio full length Flat White Moon (due out April 23rd via Memphis Industries), and sharing the album’s lead single “No Pressure.”

LISTEN: Field Music’s “No Pressure” HERE

After a pair of albums that have skewed towards the more ornate and esoteric extremes of the band’s sound, their latest began as an attempt to make something more direct and “physical,” with songs inspired by ’70s rock and folk influences, that later evolved to encompass the organic-feeling, sample-based approach found on albums like Beck’s Odelay and De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising. For the most part, the album has fewer explicitly political themes than previous records, though lead single “No Pressure” (which is accompanied by a video that pokes fun of YouTube musical instructional videos) tackles the political classes, in what David Brewis describes as a kind of inversion of the lyrics of David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure.”

“It feels like we’re in a new political paradigm where no one takes responsibility for anything and, even worse, they don’t seem to feel any shame or remorse about it,” David Brewis explains. “The song is like a mirror image of ‘Under Pressure’. But if that was about ‘people on the street,’ this is mostly from the perspective of someone up on high insisting that nothing is his fault while the rest of us scratch around trying to hold things together.“

As part of the announcement of the new album, Field Music have shared plans for a live stream show to celebrate the release of the LP that will take place at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds on April 29th. Tickets are available for purchase here.

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Iceage return with new single – “Vendetta.”

Copenhagen’s Iceage – Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan Surrballe Wieth, and Dan Kjær Nielsen – announce their fifth album, Seek Shelter, out May 7th on Mexican Summer. Today, they present a new single/video, “Vendetta,” which follows “The Holding Hand,” “an ominous transmission from a band who can summon a storm like few others” (Pitchfork). Enrolling Sonic Boom (Pete Kember of Spacemen 3) to produce the record and an additional guitarist in the form of Casper Morilla Fernandez, Seek Shelter sees Iceage’s propulsive momentum pushing them in new, expansive, ecstatic directions. A decade on from their first record, Iceage continue to harness their lives together through music.

Rønnenfelt casts the influence of Kember, the band’s first outside producer, as that of a sparring partner, another wayward mind to bounce ideas off of (along with Shawn Everett, who mixed the record) to help shape the sound. For Seek Shelter’s story of scorched-earth salvation, Iceage’s songwriting embraces conventional structures more conspicuously than it has in the past. The dirge-like drone that opens the record gives way to a wall of reverb that sounds fuller and brighter than anything they’ve committed to tape, signalling a clarity of clouds breaking. The Lisboa Gospel Collective, who joined the band for two tracks on the final day in the studio, provide a new scale to Rønnenfelt’s incantations.

As with all Iceage’s previous albums, Rønnenfelt stowed away for a set period of weeks and wrote the lyrics for Seek Shelter in one shot. Here, his lyrics reach grand heights despite its classic opacity — he sings of taking shelter, of tranquil affections that threaten to combust, and of a limp-wristed god with a cavalcade of devotees in search of relief. His expressionist imagery consistently hinges on the divine, a natural result of his desire to take a kernel of ordinary emotion and, as he explains, “blow it up like a balloon.”

On the slow-grooving new single, “Vendetta,” an electronic beat and blues signatures break through to the front. Rønnenfelt comments, “Crime is the undercurrent that runs through everything. If you don’t see it, you’re not looking. In its invincible politics, it is the glue that binds it all together. ‘Vendetta’ is an impartial dance along the illicit lines of infraction.”

The accompanying video features the band, as well as actor Zlatko Burić. Director Jonas Bang explains, “We wanted it to be less 1:1 story and more short format collage-ish – like if you flick through a chapter in a book reading a bit here and there.”

Watch Iceage’s Video for “Vendetta”

While recording, rain dripped through cracks in the ceiling of Namouche, the dilapidated wood-paneled vintage studio in Lisbon where Iceage set up for 12 days. The band had to arrange their equipment around puddles. Pieces of cloth covered slowly filling buckets so the sound of raindrops wouldn’t reach the microphones. Kember arranged garden lamps for mood lighting in the high-ceiling space. It was the longest time Iceage had ever spent making an album. When the rain had stopped, Seek Shelter revealed itself as a collection of songs radiating warmth and a profound desire for salvation in a world that’s spinning further and further out of control. Even Rønnenfelt was surprised with what they were able to create together. “When we started, I think we were just lashing out, completely blindfolded with no idea as to why and how we were doing anything. For Seek Shelter, we had a definite vision of how we wanted the album to be carved out, yet still the end result came as a surprise in terms of where we sonically were able to push our boundaries.” He’s speaking of the new record and also of their entire existence as a band, a travelogue that has catapulted these four friends far past the horizons of punk.

Watch “The Holding Hand” Video

Pre-order Seek Shelter

Seek Shelter Tracklist
1. Shelter Song
2. High & Hurt
3. Love Kills Slowly
4. Vendetta
5. Drink Rain
6. Gold City
7. Dear Saint Cecilia
8. The Wider Powder Blue
9. The Holding Hand

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Field Music unveil new single, “Orion from the Streets,” and fall tour dates.

Peter and David Brewis a.k.a. Field Music, are sharing their latest single, “Orion From the Street” (out now via Memphis Industries). The track is a prelude to a new studio album from the beloved UK band that is slated for release later in 2021, following on from 2020’s First World War concept record Making A New World.

LISTEN: Field Music’s “Orion From The Street” HERE

Peter says of “Orion From the Street”, “I wrote it in a daze – it’s full of accidental quotes and allusions – the first couple of lines I overheard in a Cary Grant documentary but they sum up the whole song – how intense impressions of love, hate, grief and guilt can be an almost hallucinatory experience.” Field Music have also announced a string of UK tour dates for October 2021. Full list of dates below. Tickets will go on sale on 15th January at 9am GMT. Tickets are available here.

“Orion From The Street” is out now on Memphis Industries.

Tour Dates
04 April 2021, Cardiff, Wales Goes Pop
02-04 July 2021, Swandlincote, Timber Festival
07 Aug 2021, Summerhall, Edinburgh International Festival
02-05 Sept 2021, Wiltshire, End of the Road Festival
07 Oct 2021, Aberdeen, Tunnels
08 Oct 2021, Glasgow, St Luke’s
09 Oct 2021, Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
14 Oct 2021, Birmingham, Mama Roux’s
15 Oct 2021, Bristol, The Fleece
16 Oct 2021, Nottingham, Rescue Rooms
21 Oct 2021, Brighton, Komedia
22 Oct 2021, London, Electric Ballroom
23 Oct 2021, Manchester, Gorilla

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Top 40 albums of 2016 – 2020: #’s 30 – 26

We reached the top 30 of my top 40 albums of the last five years. Whittling my list down to 40 records was hard enough, how about 30?

#30: Underworld – Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future (2016)

Easily one of the most optimistic and uplifting albums of the last five years, Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future was a triumphant return for Underworld and had all of us look up to a shining light ahead that could be reached if we all worked together. The themes became more important each passing year.

#29: Blanck Mass – World Eater (2017)

Speaking of records built around synths, drum machines, and analog gear – Blanck Mass’ World Eater is a powerful record that expands on Underworld’s optimism and fuels it with some trepidation and danger.

#28: Soulwax – From Deewee (2017)

The electronic music hits keep on coming. This stunning record combines vintage synths with double live drumming to produce a wicked record that was recorded in one take. One. Take. It never ceases to impress.

#27: Cookin’ Soul and MF DOOM – DOOM XMAS (2018)

Made all the more special since the untimely passing of MF DOOM, this is not only a great rap album, but it’s also a great Christmas record. Cookin’ Soul mixes samples and beats with def(t) talent and layers them over freestyles by DOOM. The result is brilliance.

#26: Ron Gallo – Stardust Birthday Party (2018)

Zen punk. It’s the best way I can describe it. Ron Gallo created this album after doing a two-week silent Zen retreat and filled it with great hooks and rip-off-the-veil lyrics about embracing presence and impermanence. It was a shot in the arm well before the COVID-19 vaccine and songs like “Always Elsewhere” will stay relevant until some sort of global consciousness is reached.

What’s coming next? A lot of shoegaze and psychedelia, that’s what. Stay tuned.

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Top 40 albums of 2016-2020: #’s 40 – 36

I realized that I’ve been running and writing 7th Level Music for five years now, and that the five-year anniversary coincided with the end of the last decade. So, in the spirit of “Everyone loves lists!”, I’ve decided to rank my top 40 albums of the last five years. I went with 40 records after I averaged the number of albums I reviewed from 2016 to 2020 and then chopped that number approximately in half.

This wasn’t an easy task (although my #1 album was quickly determined). The list went through four revisions before I felt it was “right.” Lists like this are always subjective, and there are always good, if not great, albums that don’t make the cut. There were also bands like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Oh Sees, WALL, and Here Lies Man that had multiple excellent albums within the five-year span that I wanted to highlight, but I opted to choose one from each (another difficult task) in order to get more artists onto the list.

Shall we begin?

#40: CHAI – Pink (2018)

Japanese pop punk? Yes, please. These four ladies have made some of the most fun music of the last five years. They’ve also created their own sense of fashion by trashing fashion standards and love donuts and dancing. There’s nothing to not like. Lead single “N.E.O.” was like a shot in the arm of pure dance-punk adrenaline.

#39: Caroline Rose – Superstar (2020)

Superstar is Caroline Rose’s best album yet and one that covers everything from doing things your own way to the weird world of fame that found her after she released the excellent Loner album. Rose tackles these subjects with her witty lyrics, funky grooves, and lovely voice, starting off the record with a track called “Nothing’s Impossible” and carrying that positivity through the whole record.

#38: The New Pornographers – Whiteout Conditions (2017)

For the record, The New Pornographers saw everything we experienced in the political landscape for the last four years coming as soon as the 2016 election ended. Whiteout Conditions was A.C. Newman and company’s response to the results. He and the rest of the band knew then what was coming, creating songs like the title track (about the rise of white people embracing fear more than ever and dreading what that would cause down the road) and “This Is the World of the Theatre.” It certainly was, wasn’t it?

#37: Mdou Moctar – Ilana (The Creator) (2019)

Simply a beautiful record of Tuareg music that was all about positivity, embracing light, and searching for and finding peace through love and compassion. Moctar is a phenomenal guitarist, creating stunning riffs and power, and cool dude all around. When I saw him live, he was selling Tuareg jewelry at his merch table to support a school he was building back in Algeria.

#36: L’Epee – Diabolique (2019)

This psychedelic supergroup’s debut album is a stunner and seemed to come out of nowhere. It sounds like it was unearthed from a time capsule buried in a small French coastal town in 1966 and combines the powers of Anton Newcombe, The Limiñanas, and Emmanuelle Seigner. It’s one of those records that can instantly put you into a trance or change the mood of an entire nightclub, let alone a room.

There’s plenty more to come. Stay tuned.

Keep your mind open.

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