An Acute Case: 29 July 2022

If, like me, you can count the number of gqom acts you know on one hand, Phelimuncasi have a good chance of becoming your favourite

Charlotte Adigery & Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer
File this chatter-plus-not-especially-dynamic (i.e. French) dance album next to Prioritise Pleasure. Funnier than Rebecca Taylor, Adigery still risks sounding like an opinion piece in a weekend supplement. When she’s not doing that, she’s Making Sense Stop, which is more my speed. Especially as she follows that with one that goes: "A ha ha ha ha / Ha ha ha ha / Aaaaah ha ha ha ha," etc. * (‘Hey’)

Buck 65 & Tachichi: Flash Grenade
Two birds with one stone from Richard Terfry: yard sale of his more delicate samples (keybs and winds featuring heavily) and good turn for his Nova Scotian homeboy, whose level best is sufficient. ** (‘Kill Em With Silence’)

Buck 65: King of Drums
After the emotional abstraction of recent releases, this is backstop-turned-rapper Richard Terfry’s course correction. Twenty-one “parts”-not-songs (their workings on show because you can’t keep an abstractionist down) are welded, riveted, forged and fused into a beat machine whose endless configurations keep it in perpetual motion, all powered by a synchronic fascination with hip-hop’s first words: clever rhymes, funky breakbeats, witty samples. By no-selling his own jokes and drawing from a nerdy collection of words and idioms (“heavens to Murgatroyd”, “the fastest horse wins the purse”, “it’s just a bit of scuttlebutt”), Terfry dishes up wordplay for wordplay’s sake so tricksy it’s almost meaningful. “Out of the frying pan / Into the Venn diagram.” Um, okay. “They say the heart hunts lonely / Anything worth doing is worth doing once only.” Yeah, Rich, you’re right! Vocab’s matched by oddball samples that probably only exist at the back of his garage and drum loops it wouldn’t surprise me to learn he’s been working on since he unwrapped his first 808 in 1990. Because regrettable wrong turns included, his motivation has never wavered. As he put it a mere nineteen years ago: “Craftsmanship—it’s a quality that some lack.” A

Sinead O’Brien: Drowning In Blessings (2020)
Limerick to Dublin to Paris to London poet and her able g and d (but who's the b?) rush a sound that needs more time to unfurl its pomposity. * (‘Fall With Me')

Sinead O’Brien: Time Bend and Break The Bower
Multihyphenate singer, poet, dancer, fashion designer, and—I mean this in the nicest way—bullshit artist whose beetle-browed poesy dangles many keys, none of which fit a lock. "Would the ankle snap to free the snare from the fawn?" and “Where great appetite comes to feast, a purge of mutant fishes wash up on the surface" are just as likely fortune cookie hokum as genuine percipience. All on trend with UK&I punk affiliates who duck overt meaning. There may be plausible reasons for this: overtaxed attention economy? middle-class embarrassment? political disenfranchisement? None, it turns out, are that important here. Because what gets O’Brien over isn’t message, it’s delivery. She revels in words as sound, smiling through her prophetic intoning and word-stretching. Like fellow blah-blah-ist and fashion industry insider Florence Shaw (productivity managers should check all staff aren’t just doodling abstract lyrics) she feigns aloofness from her band. But when guitarist Julian Hanson and drummer Oscar Robertson turn their modernist disco-punk to something prettier or—I’m pleased to report—heavier, she's right there with them, the same Beckettian question on all their lips, sticks and strings: “Wanting, wanting, wanting… what?” A MINUS

Phelimuncasi: Ama Gogela
When this Durban trio’s gqom powers up to its full whomp, their dance delirium threatens as much as it intoxicates—and not by accident. Makan Nana, Khera and Malathon started making music to extend their leftist activism, incorporating elements of the toyi-toyi dance used to intimidate police during anti-apartheid demonstrations. As such, they accrue power and personality from the group collective, which includes seven different producers. Independently, their contributions are minimal. Together, they descend on droning basslines in a swarm of chants, ululations, groans, chirrups and chatter (one chap's speciality is sounding like a despondent cartoon dog). Matching them for outright bizarreness are whistles, sirens, boings and hoots. And then there are the unnameables; noises that could be man or machine. The loop in Wazini Ngo Qoh which may be someone failing to play the didgeridoo. The concatenation of (best guess) dry barks, bird calls, and hacksaws that closes Inamandla. Only Kolamula Ukusa’s six minutes of enchanting idiophone passes for respite. The rest of the time, this is the sound of police running for their lives. A

Harry Styles: Harry’s House
I won’t blame anyone who's suspicious of sympathetic counsel from the “think how much pussy you're gonna get” guy, but the way Styles flattens not only his voice but his entire persona has me convinced. Does wonders for his character; not so much the album, which is left a blockbuster in search of its star. ** (‘Late Night Talking’)

Water Damage: Repeater
Label’s named after a Wire song, album title’s unequivocal about what it does, and the three tracks (twenty-two, seven and twelve minutes respectively) are called Reel 2, Reel 5b, and Reel 4b because this Austin septet’s preferred recording method is to play until the tape runs out. So, a lot to be said for nomenclature. As for songs, while I can’t tell you where each one is going, or even the distance from A to B, I can report that it feels right when they get there, they never tread in exactly the same place twice, and they’re forever amending the directions. Jazzier than rock and rockier than jazz, they thump and vamp like both, punctuating their surprisingly pliable but nonetheless oppressive guitar drone with more legible tones when the time is right—which is probably not when you expect. As music that induces headaches (sorry Maddy) they portend something not right, fuzzy, misshapen, broken. Whatever it is, the drummers’ (plural—they always deploy at least two of their three) relentless churn and brushed cymbals suggest it's neither stopping or firing on all cylinders. Gets skippier towards the end, with increasingly unpredictable drum fills. I choose to hear those optimistically. Gloomier readings are available. A