NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out Oct. 4

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

NPR Music's Lars Gotrich and Sheldon Pearce round up the most exciting albums out this Friday, and reflect on the history of instrumental music as protest.Featured albums:• The Smile, 'Cutouts'• Blood Incantation, 'Absolute Elsewhere'• Half Waif, 'See You At The Maypole'• Darius Jones, 'Legend of e'Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye)'• Yasmin Williams, 'Acadia'• Godspeed You! Black Emperor, 'NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD'Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] a longer list of new albums out Oct. 4 and to stream our New Music Friday playlist, visit https://npr.org/music.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Sheldon, do you like to get in the pit? I do like to get in the pit. Really? Yeah. What was the last pit you got into? Ooh, it's been many years. Oh, okay. You know, back in the Warped Tour days, which you know, that's a while ago.

That's a long time ago. I still get in the pit. When the spirit moves. Oh, yeah. Sometimes it just comes over you. You hear a really dumb but amazing riff, and you're like, I got to get in there. And I did that recently for Soul Glow. And I woke up the next morning.

I was like, why does my side hurt? I'm like, oh. My ribs are probably bruised. It's New Music Friday for October 4th. My name is Lars Gottrich. I am a producer, writer, Viking of Ampire Music. And I am joined today by Sheldon Pierce. Yes, hello.

I bring up the pit because, is we are going to discuss an album by a metal band today on the show that I am extremely excited about. We're going to be telling you about five albums coming out today, October 4th. I'm going to just going to throw it to you, Sheldon, for the first one. Tell me a little about The Smile. The Smile has returned for their second album of the year. called Cutouts, the trio of Radiohead's Tom York, Johnny Greenwood, and then the drummer and co-founder of Sons of Commit, Tom Skinner. They debuted in 2022 with a light for attracting attention.

This new album, Cutouts, was recorded in Oxford at Abbey Road around the same time as Wall of Eyes. It's got string arrangements from the London Contemporary Orchestra, and it's got that same sort of eerie the smile sound, pulling from both radiohead and obviously Johnny Greenwood's work as a composer. But it's also has this sort of like kinetic drumming from Sons of Komet that is kind of what separates it from the proper radio head stuff. I mean, all right. So I appeared on this podcast two weeks ago and there was a hint that I had fallen out of love with Radiohead. Oh, wow. So it was something that I admitted. So when you said, I want to do the smile, I'm like, fine. I remember I did listen to the smile record that came out

this year. I liked it enough. And I edited a piece by Grayson Curran that we published around the time when that album came out. And I really liked his central thesis. The smile is like really exciting, like musically and texturally. But the thing that like Grayson was having a hard time with is Tom York doesn't know how not to be Tom York. Yeah. Like vocally. And I thought that was an interesting idea because I think that was partly why I had fallen out of love. So I kind of went in to cut out sort of with that mindset.

And I was pleasantly surprised that I don't, I'm. I know these are from the same sessions, but it actually does sound like Tom York doesn't want to sound like Tom York on this record. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you talk about the sort of textual component of this band. I think we should hear a little bit of that. I just want an improvisation record between Johnny Greenwood and Tom Skinner. Yeah, yeah.

There is such a great interplay between them. the tension at play between how fast and how skittering a lot of these drum patterns are with how the production just sort of hangs at a distance. There's this middle ground that Tom York seems to be navigating in a lot of these songs that I think makes this record a lot more sort of dynamic than the previous record, even though I think Wall of Eyes is probably going to be in my top ten for the year. But I do love just how fast, how jittery, a lot of these songs feel. The fun thing about the smile that I will say is that it reminds you of what a strange and inventive guitarist Johnny Greenwood is.

He really, he has a way of tricking the melody. and finding kind of like these uncanny ways for year-a-year to get used to the melody you're supposed to follow, but then it kind of like goes off on its own tangible. I don't know that I'm completely won over, but I like this record a lot. Yeah, well, I would welcome you back into the arms of the Radiohead and Radiohead Adjacent Project Embrace. That is the Smile's new album, Cutouts. And I think we're going to get into the record that you were talking about at the open, Lars. Yeah.

Sheldon, are you ready? I'm ready. Blood incantation. Oh, yes. The album is absolute elsewhere. And I could talk about this record, honestly, for the next 30 minutes. But I will say this definitively. This is the metal album of the year.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's just start with Stargate 1. Yeah. In the metal scene, there are folks who are very passionate about staying true to the roots of metal. And there are those who want to see it go forward. And then there are those who just want to see it to bring everybody into the pit, basically. This is a record that sort of does all of that. It is steeped in the death metal traditions of a band like Morbent Angels.

or Demalik, but it is also interested in 70s Prog Rock, and stuff like Tangerine Dream, and Pink Floyd, and it's got a little bit of thrash metal, it's got a little, it's just got a little bit of everything. This album is just two tracks, totaling out to about 45 minutes or so. They're kind of like split into three, they call them tablets. which I enjoy. They're very much inspired by science fiction novels and comics and things like that. Their spiel is sort of what if what of human civilization was actually pushed forward by alien civilization.

Like, what of aliens? You listen to the lyrics, but they're growling the lyrics, so maybe you don't understand them. They do actually sing on this record a little bit. and those kind of like pink floydie passages. But then it'll just descend into passages that absolutely rip. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God.

And there was a time during, like, adult swim in the early 2010s when it would air like robot chicken and venture bros and metallocalypts all in a row. Yeah. They'd re-air at like 345 to like 4.30. And you would wake up in the middle of just like the most chaotic, glorious sequence. And it's like, that's what this feels like to me. I mean, there's this really ascendant, almost serene section on tablet two of the message

that is just stunning. I mean, it starts about four minutes in. It's nearly hymnal. And then it like steadily builds voice, drums, guitar, all working in tandem to this huge, massive finish. And there's just so much depth. and dynamism across this room. But, like, there's kind of, like, been this avenue of death metal, especially in the last decade or so, of, like, really thinking existentially about death and not just gore.

You're thinking about, like, what it means to live before you die. Yeah. Guitarist and vocalist Paul Riedel described the record as the soundtrack to a Herzog-style sci-fi epic about the history of, and battle for human consciousness itself, which is like, what a grandiose thing to try to take on with any passage of music. There are lots of great other metal records out this year that I've loved, but nothing has given me such joy

but also challenged me this year. I am so thrilled with this record by Blood Incitation. Sheldon, why don't you set up this next record? I love you when it's the wound. Yeah, our next record is from the artist Half Waf. It's called See You at the Maple. It's her first album since the 2021 record, Mytho Poetics. This record has a really heady backstory.

She suffered a miscarriage through the process of recording it and then had medical complications in the aftermath that she was doing. dealing with. So a lot of it thinks about loss and moving through it. She has said, you know, the record sort of embodies every story of loss, the loss of a life, the loss of a dream, the loss of trust and hope and faith, but it's also a story of sort of finding your way back again. You let me get this for... Something I've been thinking a lot about this year is that often when you're

musicians tell stories like these often about loss, either of a person or a faith. We often call them brave. And I think that idea that we put on these musicians might, I think, has changed. Because I don't know that necessarily musicians want to be brave in that moment. They just want to be people. And so they are telling the story that they need to tell because it's in their heart and it's in their soul. they gotta get it out. And they don't necessarily... There's a moment on this song that, near the end of it,

where she kind of states it very plainly, where she says, my hardest time is going to be in the month of July. And presumably, that's when she had her miscarriage. And it hit me so hard. Watching the her her own. It's really powerful for her to work through these emotions out in the open. And it's just such a gorgeous sort of appreciation of life in the wake of deep trauma.

That's Half Waf's See You at the Maypole. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll have a new record from the saxophonist and composer, Darius Jones. And we're back. Sheldon, our next album here on New Music Friday, is from the saxophonist Darius Jones. It's called Legend of Eboy, the Hypervigilant I. His band on this record is his longtime drummer, Gerald Cleaver, and the bassist Chris Lightcap. Darius Jones, if you don't know, is a saxophonist who is currently based in New York City. This is the seventh chapter, and I propose nine-part series. It's called the Manish Boy Epic, in which he started in 2009. He typically works in free jazz circles, and he has a tone on his saxophone that can be big and brawny, and even sometimes when I've seen him perform a little bit terrifying, but can also be mournful and beautiful. And this is a very big.

a record where he was specifically interested in unpacking black trauma. He has a way of, in his horn and in his pieces, of taking a theme and breaking it apart in such a way that it reminds you to take a breath, but it also allows you to scream. Yeah. There is sort of like a melancholy undertone to a lot of the playing on this record. There is a song on here, No More My Lord, which is an arrangement of a prison song that was recorded by the music historian Alan Lomax at Parchman Farm, which is a notorious Mississippi institution. And it's sort of fascinating to hear him interpret that music. through his horn.

He carries the weight of the melodic line with such, like, intention and grottas. And then as Cleaver and Lightcap kind of hold at a distance, he breaks free at the end. It's just like squalls of noise a little bit. Yeah.

You can hear all the soul, all the history in his horn when he plays it. That was Darius Jones. The album is Legend of E. Boy, the hypervigilant eye. we have one more album to talk about, to maybe take us out of kind of like how mournful and abrasive the last record we just play. I think we should play something very pretty. It's Acadia by Yasmin Williams.

Yasmin Williams is a guitarist that is in and out of the finger style guitar tradition. So finger style is basically where. you are creating a little mini orchestra just on one instrument. And Yasmin Williams came to our attention pretty early on. She was actually a Tiny Desk Contest Entrant. She has a new record called Acadia, and it features several contributors. Let me run down just someone named Don Fleming's,

Kakke King, Alison Degroot, and Tatiana Hargre, a darling side, the folk band, and Marcus Gilmore, Emmanuel Wilkins. I mean, it's a list. I think William Tyler's on this record, too, somewhere. And I follow this scene pretty closely. And Yasmin Williams is truly forging new ground in the finger style,

because not only for, a lot of people like to talk about her technique. She likes to flip the guitar onto her lap, and she does a lot of finger tapping. She'll use other various means to get different sounds and textures. But the thing that really distinguishes her is that she knows how to tell story. There's a way that the song sort of invite you in and take you into their embrace and feel very comforting. I mean, on the cover, she's sitting in a field of flowers before a mountain. and guitar in hand sort of smiling.

And that's the feeling that the entire album evokes, like somewhere out in the open, wind rushing, away from the hustle and bustle. There's something about the finger style of guitar playing that has, like, a very specific intimacy. There's something almost, like, supernal and, like, cozy about her playing. That really makes you just, like, want to sit in front of her cross-legs,

style and take it all in. It's just really beautiful. That was the album Acadia by Jasmine Williams. But there are a ton of new albums also coming out today that we just kind of want to run through. Sheldon, what do you got? Yeah, you know, Dan Snaith returns to his Caribou project for the first time since 2020s, suddenly for a new full length. It's called Honey, seeking universal floor fillers for everybody. And on the opposite end of the electronic spectrum is a new sort of expanded edition of the British producer Apex Twins' 1994 classics selected Ambient Works Volume 2. The Coldplay frontman Chris Martin recently revealed that the band would call it quits after

its 12th album. Well, we've got its 10th album coming out. It's called Moon Music and the second Joker movie, Joker Fuali Adieu, which stars Walking Phoenix in the titular role and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn is kind of a musical. The soundtrack for which is out today as the movie hits theaters. Lars, you have some picks as well. Don Rashard, an artist I know that you love Sheldon. She has her second collaboration out today with Spencer Zon called Quiet in a World Full of Noise.

she is a chameleon of music, and on this one, as she continues, this idea of kind of sort of being an ambient torch balladeer. It's a gorgeous record. There's a new record out today also by Joan Shelley called Moody Ring. It's an EP, so just a few short songs, but they're all gorgeous. The indie rock band, Wild Pink, has a new record out called Doling the Horns, and then a little bit of a throwback. Sixpence none the richer. They kind of had a big hit in the 90s called Kiss Me

and fight me on this because I still think it's a great song even though it's overplayed. But to show its longevity, apparently a member of Black Pink, Lisa just sampled Kiss Me on a new song. So take that. But they have a new EP out today. their first in several, several years.

It's called Rosemary Hill, and we're going to go out on a little bit of the song, Julia. There's another album out today, pull it together for one who's died. There's another album out today, October 4th, that we wanted to talk about and that we had kind of a bigger idea about. The band, Godspeed, Jew Black Emperor, has been around for over 30 years at this point, putting out several albums of what they like to call Post Rock.

And the title of the album is no title. As of 13 February, 2024, 28,340 dead. Yeah, all of that, that is the name. of the album. That's the name of the album. And people glommed on to the title, non-title, very quickly. It was very quickly understood what it was in reference to that presumably the 13th of February is when they finished making the album and they had to come up with a title. And so they decided to reference the number of Palestinians that have died so far in the Israel and Palestinian conflict. As of this taping October 2nd, 2024. That number has semi-officially risen to 41,000, but there's really

no way of knowing how many Palestinians have died in the conflict so far. Gatsby-Dubach Emperor is an instrumental rock band. They don't sing. There are occasionally clips of field recordings of like past speeches or from obscure. are films that are kind of woven into their recordings, but nobody really sings. So Sheldon, what does it mean to make protest music that's wordless, that's instrumental? Yeah, I mean, for me personally, I'm always looking for some kind of intensity or tension in the music itself, some kind of build up and release, or at least some kind of quality of about it that cannot be ignored.

Something about it that I must reconcile sonically. Something about it doesn't resolve, it doesn't settle. I think in the case of this record, which you mentioned, can be on the more minimalist side of the Godspeed

discography. It's just how eerie it can sound, how there is sort of a fog hanging over it. There's just something about it that doesn't seem quite right. I think about the creeping, ominous feeling on a song like Babies in the Thunder Cloud. There's something about it that you can't quite shake. And it's like,

at the seven minute mark, it briefly retreats, but then it returns more intense than before, just like rushing right toward you. And nearly all of the songs start in this quiet, far off place and then erupt. You can hear the anxiety. It got me thinking about, other instrumental music that has been used as protest. From recent history and from much older history, there was a piece from the composer Ambrose-Ackin, Missouri, called Hooded Procession, Parenthetical, read the names out loud.

And it was his response to all the black folks that were killed in police brutality. And I remember that moment very clearly in 2020, when there was a lot of that in protest where people would stand on stages and they would read aloud the names of black men and women who had been killed by the police. And the way that this piece of music moves is just a fender rote. That's it. The same phrase repeated over and over again. but the phrasing

feels like spoken word. You hear the urgency and you hear maybe you hear the lip quivering. Yeah, I mean, it has a similar quality to the Godspeed record in that I think a lot of the tension is in the silence, in the moments between those Fender Road's notes.

There are a lot of jazz musicians in the activist tradition, someone like Emmanuel Wilkins, who released Ferguson an American tradition, which is also in conversation with that same violence. That history goes back to the 1940s and 50s and 60s. You have like the drummer, Max Roaches, We Insist. You also have music from a band like Sons of Kemet, which has the song in memory of Samira Awad, which is also in conversation with the violence committed against Palestinians. There is a sort of rich tradition of the text of the music or the context of the music, sort of having to sell you a little bit on what is actually taking place. I mean, to that point, the piece Alabama by John Coltrane. John Coltrane, even though he kind of like toward the end of his life, became a bit more outspoken and angry about what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement. He was rarely explicit in his music about it.

And I've read this great piece on WBGO from 2020 about Alabama, where the writer basically tracked down what was he pulling from. And the theory was that John Coltrane read a newspaper article quoting Martin Luther King Jr. after the Little Rock Nine. And that John Coltrane was using the cadence of that speech to inform how he wrote the music. I think the thing for me, when it comes to instrument, instrumental protest music. Whatever information, but more importantly, whatever feelings you bring to that music is probably more meaningful than all the extra textual stuff.

Yeah, I mean, there are like some very specific examples where the music itself is literally protest. The Atecker EP Anti protested the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which would prohibit gatherings where music with, end quote, a succession of repetitive beats was played, aka raves. And so as a clever counter, the duo programmed a song like Flutter

to have non-repetitive beats. But I mean, even not knowing that, it's an insane piece of music to listen to, and it feels sort of like an endless Tron light cycle battle, which like it really feels like an action. of war on this very bizarre attempt to curtail music's utility out in public as a community form. You do have instances like that where the music itself literally is an act of protest. But in most cases, it does feel like you are forced to draw your own conclusions. You are

forced to either step outside of the music and literally try to engage with the explicit artistic statement being made, or you have to draw from within. You have to decide, hey, this is what this record means to me. This is how it functions as my call to action, and this is how I will try to apply it in my own personal. That's it for this week's New Music Friday. Make sure you come back next week.

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