A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 20 Mar 2022 to 26 Mar 2022.

WILT_2022-12

1. i walk this earth all by myself – EKKSTACY
2. Это сильнее – Nikita Kamenskiy, Charusha
3. Pica – Bloodslide
4. 2020 – Midwife
5. Back From The Dead – Part Chimp
6. Fast N All – Enumclaw
7. Grass Jeans – Kim Gordon
8. Breathe Suite A (feat. Midnightroba) – Ben Marc, MidnightRoba
9. 3D Warrior – Nightmares On Wax, Shabaka Hutchings, Haile Supreme, Wolfgang Haffner
10. Swoon – Slow Crush
11. Gloom – Slow Crush
12. Hush – Slow Crush
13. Too Wild – Seasurfer
14. Berimbau – Naima Bock
15. Dancin Tony In Cuba 1959 – CAVS
16. Swordfish – CAVS
17. Basic Instinct – CAVS
18. Don’t Lose My Number – Phil Collins
19. Classic – Adrian Gurvitz
20. I Can Hear Your Heartbeat – Chris Rea
21. Nice While It Lasted – Famous
22. Most Modern Painting – Sinead O Brien

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2022-12

Notes

I am pretty excited to be putting together this week’s playlist. The song selections are strong, and there is also a good mix of genres and styles. Even better yet, I became a new fan of some of these musical acts.

I was curious about EKKSTACY’s music from the previous week’s playlist, so I went to listen to more of the artist’s material. i walk this earth all by myself is a very pleasant lo-fi pop/indie production with earnest songwriting and arrangement. I did not find the rest of his EP living up to the potential of what I have heard thus far, but I will chalk it up to subjectivity in taste.

I was also curious about the music of Yuri Usachev and Nikita Kamenskiy, and they each have their own projects. Somehow along the way, I added Это сильнее for haunting melody and dynamics. There is a folk quality to songwriting, and I think it adds to the flavour of the song.

I probably stumbled on a cache of shoegaze, grunge, post-metal for the upcoming section. If I recall correctly, it would have been Spotify’s Discover Playlist. So what got recommended to me?

Pica by Bloodslide presents us with some evil-sounding guitar tones that deliver an atmosphere of an unpleasant mist through a dark forest, a full moon masked by clouds.

2020 is a slow burn of no-wave glory. The scooped-mids of what sounds like a metal zone distortion pedals delivers the main flavour for the primary guitar motif, while a ghostly falsetto whispers horror into your ears (And it feels like heaven’s so far away).

The first three chords to Back From The Dead sound almost like Just by Radiohead, but by the fourth chord, the song launches into its own trajectory. A mix of grunge and alt-rock, the guitar tones are familiar, and warm. Almost welcoming you back to a familiar era of music, but with the urgency of the present.

Fast N All shares with us an angelic guitar riff, but if it was stoned out of its mind. The reverb on the guitar tone takes you slightly off the ground, but then shatters you back to slumber. Nothing to see here, don’t wish too hard because you might burst a blood vessel.

Almost by design, Grass Jeans by Kim Gordon comes on. A chorus-processed bass tones sets the current of this alt-rock river. The song trudges along, Gordon’s vocals carrying like the wind. We travel fast, but we travel to nowhere.

A bit of a slight interlude, but Breathe Suite A by Ben Marc gives us some very fierce musical concepts that meld jazz, classical, electronica, and film scores. This music is very exciting.

3D Warrior is a great sampling of the moods created by Nightmares On Wax. If you are calling the evening in, then offer your final ruminations with this track.

And somehow, we stumble back into shoegaze territory. But this time, I am more receptive than I have been in years. When Swoon really blasts off, it reminded me of why I like the genre. When reverbed-soaked minor chords drench a song while being stirred by a demonically-distorted bass guitar and the drumming is sprinting down and highway full of traffic, those are times when shoegaze songs tend to shine bright. Also, when they’re not self-indulgent to last beyond three minutes.

I also added Gloom and Hush because the tempos so achingly stretch time, that it is more of a vibe than an analysis.

Interestingly, I had included Slow Crush in WILT_2022-05 seven weeks ago, but back then it was more of an oddity inclusion.

Too Wild is a brilliant dreampop (dreampunk?) inclusion. Let’s go.

I have to say, I thought the playlist would end with Naima Bock’s Berimbau. A tremendous latin-jazz afro-beat fusion that just stands counter to all downer music prior. But somehow, this playlist has just a little more to give.

At the corner one of the playlists, I noticed “Fans also like…”

The album art by CAVS was right there. A psychedelic painting of a drummer floating in the air, pieces of the drumkit floating alongside the drummer. Some of the cymbals were UFOs. Evoking a sense of a drummer trying to transcend the physical plane, and attempting to enter a cosmic one.

You bet I was curious.

And my hunch was also met with validation. It is a whole album’s worth of one man playing the drums. And it is glorious, hypnotic, energetic, and incredibly freeing.

I knew I had to add Dancin Tony In Cuba 1959 because the flavour of the composition was such a great introduction to the potential of this concept. Swordfish and Basic Instinct I added because of the boldness of expression in the performances.

Obviously I did not recognise the artist’s name, but he is one of the two drummers in King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard as I later found out. This also helps explains how such a concept became a recording, and why it is not outside the ordinary to have happened.

Almost finally, Phil Collins? Well, I was curious as to what other famous drummers were doing in their careers besides drumming for bands. Collin’s solo material was a great starting point. I had always known how critically celebrated Collins was as a drummer, singer, musician, etc… but I was never that familiar with his body of work apart from the most commercially successful of his hits. Along the way, music by Brand X came up, which would have been great additions to any jazz, or progressive jazz playlists, but Don’t Lose My Number just stood out with its stellar production, as well as musical and vocal performances. It is music like this that also appears to have been co-developed alongside Japan’s new-music movement in the mid-eighties.

Classic is a song that I heard countless times as a child, considering it was on Class 95 FM a lot in the nineties, and I listened to this particular radio station a lot through my father. Still, it was pleasant to be reacquainted with this song. A bit of nostalgia, but also a bit of appreciation for the arrangements and constraint displayed on this recording were some of the reasons I included it in the playlist.

I Can Hear Your Heartbeat is the kind of pop-rock that came out of the eighties. Some new ideas, new production methods, new innovations towards songwriting, instrumentation, and recording. I think I will explore this record a bit more in the future.

I almost thought we would have ended off with Chris Rea, but we end off with Nice While It Lasted and Most Modern Painting instead. The former is a clanging post-punk industrial track that fires on all cylinders from the get go, while the latter is a tremendous vocal performance amidst the an almost post-hardcore musical arrangement where the backing band seems meandering in one direction, and the vocals pull on a leash dragging everyone back in another direction. Absolutely brilliant.