For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
Ian William Craig
A Turn of Breath
[Recital]
Achingly delicate and comfortingly crushing, A Turn of Breath finds opera singer Ian William Craig fully engaged with that titular breath, pulling it through nimbuses of analogue static and machine-generated harmonies as he crafts pieces that rest unperturbed in the space between song dynamics and ambient structures. That voice, or rather, the potential textures drawn out of it, are the focus, but the record doesn’t aspire to theoretical rigor, and it’s all the better for it, indulging in momentary detours into reams of lightly processed acoustic guitar and plateaus of gorgeously sad, near-traditional song. Its focus drifts as much as its song structures, whorls of voice and sorrow and sonic fabric called up and left to dissipate. There’s nothing inherent in Craig’s music that resists analysis or careful criticism, but it’s apparent why our review attempted to bypass that for the poetic.
James Ferraro
Suki Girlz
[Self-Released]
With Suki Girlz, “Ferraro’s Metropolis” has undergone the evaporative transformation from perdition (eternal punishment, damnation) to Dianetics (the corporate, metaphysical upgrade via cash money). Such, the Orphic poetics that have characterized Rraro’s “croon” — his vigilant interiority, his exiled personhood — have been audited. Strange, then, that Suki Girlz is his most accessible statement yet: the grooves are attractive, glossy, relatively uncomplicated pieces that promote his ideology efficiently. His aesthetic has never been more stomach-able. Yet, despite the “non-oppressive” gloss, the message is sinister; there are images of deformed 3D-rendered models, inflated lips, Malibu™ on ice, and Louis Vuitton™ splayed out on @suki_girl_’s Instagram like ready-to-be-inhaled cocaine/semio-text. To put the mixtape in Scientological terms, Suki Girlz embodies the careful removal of the reactive, subconscious mind to reach a depersonalized rhythm. To put it in physical terms, we see the surgical removal of the unwanted nose, the purchase of blue contacts — plastic beats to chorus our “shadow dancing through [this] luxury life…”
Gem Jones
Admiral Frenchkiss
[Goaty Tapes]
Gem Jones wants to say yes. Yes to every juvenile folly, yes to every unrequited love, yes to every slobbering joy, and yes to all the flawed, earthly detritus he shoves into the giddy pile that is Admiral Frenchkiss. His first tape since 2012’s Exhaust, its Dadaist world is teeming with life, with dappy keyboard runs, twitching guitar squiggles, transcendently deranged ballads, and implausibly listenable skree. And if his barely categorizable no-wave jazz-pop funk vaudeville-soul teaches us anything, it’s that yeasaying positivity is enough to inject meaning into the chaos of the universe, or at least enough to inject the chaos of genre-hopping noise with actual tunes. That’s right — tunes! So part your lips and say yes.
Seth Graham
Goop
[Noumenal Loom]
By the very fact that something can exist, then it must already exist. The elements for anything and everything are continuously in place; it’s just a matter of figuring out the formula. Manufacturing, after all, is a process of realization. Seth Graham knows this. Noumenal Loom knows this. And now we know this. The trimmed fat and salty brine of time spent listening and un-listening are apparent on Graham’s Goop. Risible paint strokes mix with confident exultations, creating a profound, wry, and fascinating listen. Nothing is sacred; everything is for the taking. Choral cuts get cut up, as do pianos and synths, gulps and breaths, and faint field recordings. But the process isn’t really the important thing here; it’s the byproduct.
Call Super
Suzi Ecto
[Houndstooth]
Call Super is as elusive as he is all-consuming. With Suzi Ecto, the club was shown to be a proper infraction, a natural and natal force. There’s a serving of live instrument and vocal abstraction throughout that constructs that entirely post-conceptual club. The kicks are sponge-y, less propulsive and more axis-orienting. Concréte collages and melodic percussive measures burst through and swirl around the stereo field, his songs calling to mind electrical storms, the ominous moments of unease, the beginnings of political unrest. Call Super has taken the club out of the hands of escapism — or rather, has dragged the realism of the outside in.
For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
