Wiki – Elixir (ft. Obongjayar & JJ)
Wiki partnered with two Brits for his latest single “Elixir,” which premiered today on BBC Radio 1Xtra. The track pairs the Brooklyn rapper with a smoky percussion-heavy beat and a soaring patois hook from singer Obongjayar, evoking some of the breakout work by Wiki’s group Ratking. It’s welcome following Wiki’s more traditionalist aesthetic on last year’s solo debut No Mountains in Manhattan. Jesse James Solomon adds a guest verse.
The release follows a quiet 2018 by the XL signee. Wiki released “In the Park” featuring Brooklyn duo Gloss Gang in September and appeared on label boss Richard Russell’s February album Everything Is Recorded. His tweet sharing the new song suggest he’s been restless. “Sick of ALL the cool guy shit. We making quality fucking art on this side,” he wrote. “If the powers at be wanna keep pushing the same agenda it’s all good. See me in the history books.”
Read the rest of this article at Spin
Lee “Scratch” Perry – African Starship
The 82-year-old Perry—best known for his experimental mixing techniques and collaborations with artists like Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Clash and Beastie Boys—recorded Rainford in Jamaica, Brazil and London with producer Adrian Sherwood, one of his longtime collaborators. “It’s the most intimate album Lee has ever made,” Sherwood said of the project in a statement. “But at the same time the musical ideas are very fresh. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve come up as a piece of work.”
Perry has issued dozens of albums under various names, including several with his early studio band, the Upsetters. Rainford follows 2017’s Super Ape Returns to Conquer, a reworking of the 1976 Upsetters LP, Super Ape. He will launch a U.K. tour on March 15th in Kingsbridge, England
Reggae innovator Lee “Scratch “Perry will release a new album, Rainford, on May 10th via On-U Sound Records.
The songwriter-producer previewed the nine-track set with the woozy new track “African Starship,” which finds Perry speak-singing over a slowed-down dub groove laced with wah-wah licks, fluttering flute and moaning, muted trumpet.
Read the rest of this article at RollingStone
Helado Negro – Please Won’t Please
Helado Negro’s music is often inseparable from frontman Robert Carlos Lange’s identity as a child of Ecuadorian immigrants. His last album, 2016’s Private Energy, addressed the complexities of an immigrant identity with songs like “Young, Latin and Proud,” in which he grappled with the ways that your skin can bring you pride and hardship in equal measure.
For his new album, Lange has turned his focus further inward. His lyrics are more opaque, his songs more obtuse. “Left out an ocean on top / Blue tie and orange won’t let go,” he sings in a gentle baritone over a thrumming dream-groove. The meaning is less immediately obvious than on a song like “Young, Latin and Proud.” It feels like the impressionistic thoughts of a bedridden mind, the description of feelings as colors or the faintest sense of things outside a window.
But Lange’s focus on identity hasn’t wavered—it’s only become more molecular, less foregrounded. “That brown won’t go / Brown just glows,” he sings in the chorus. Lange took inspiration from the Jamaica Kincaid short story “Girl” in writing the album, and that story’s focus on the granular nature of racial identity is felt here. The color of his skin is rendered in the broadest, most subconscious terms. He’s still proud, yes. But the people who’d want to see him suffer for it are more apparent than ever. “And we’ll light ourselves on fire / just to see who really / wants to believe that it’s just me.”
Read the rest of this article at Paste
NOMVDSLVND (pronounced ‘nomads land’) may live in Toronto, but as many of us in large cities can attest to, having a home and knowing your place are two very different things. Despite a background in dance, NOMVDSLVND crafts music that, instead of compelling an energetic dancefloor, interrogates the uncertainty that comes with trying to find one’s community. Perhaps his transition from dance to music was the creative spark for this idea. Many of the tracks on Part 1 of the 2-part release ‘More Harm Than Good’ slip in and out of musical ideas at ease, like a wallflower timidly testing the waters of a gathering. NOMVDSLVND creates lush backdrops for these ideas, mixing field recordings, found sounds, and broken beats that make each track an entirely new space.
On ‘Belong’, which you can hear above, he uses Rhodes-like chords to invoke a melancholy mood, a sense of feeling unsettled, of knowing what you want but not knowing how to get there. Broken beats skitter underneath, dropping in and out of the track, underpinning that anxious feeling. Punctuating this idea, he uses heavily processed vocal snippets throughout that further capture the distance we can sometimes feel between where we are and where we want to be. It’s an intoxicating concoction.
Read the rest of this article at ADSR
Adia Victoria – Different Kind Of Love
Adia Victoria today released the video for “Different Kind Of Love,” the second single from her forthcoming album Silences.
The video indulges Victoria’s inner Francophile, recreating as it were a mid-‘60s-era French television show with Paris musician Madeleine Besson acting as host. It was directed by Alex Bittan.
“The video is only one take,” Victoria says, “and this captures the relentless spirit of the repeated refrain — between the world and me, tell me what will be? who do you love, tell me who do you love?”
Silences will be released February 22 via Canvasback Music. It was produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond Studio in upstate New York. The album is said to grapple with a complex of issues facing modern women.
Read the rest of this article at American Song Writer
