This week in Indie Basement: Wilco‘s Cate Le Bon-produced Cousin, and Blonde Redhead‘s first album in nearly a decade, plus Don Letts, Melenas, Seablite, and Modern Nature, plus a tribute to Moondog starring Kronos Quartet, Jarvis Cocker, Marissa Nadler, Rufus Wainwright, and more.
Over in Notable Releases, Andrew reviews Animal Collective, Armand Hammer and more.
With Stop Making Sense back in theaters — see it in IMAX if you can, wow! — I ranked all 10 of Talking Heads albums. Where does your favorite fall on my list?
Head below for this week’s reviews. See you in October.
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ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Blonde Redhead – Sit Down to Dinner (section1)
Blonde Redhead’s first album in nearly a decade is one of their best
The title to Blonde Redhead’s 10th album has a double meaning. It’s a reference to the band’s ritual of sharing meals together when recording or on tour, at the insistence of Italian-born brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace, but it also came from singer Kazu Makino reading Joan Didion’s acclaimed grief tome The Year of Magical Thinking where the author witnessed her husband drop dead at the dinner table: “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” The two-part title track to Sit Down to Dinner is both of those things at once: mournful, with death and that Didion quote at its core, but also inviting thanks to the trio’s distinctive melodies, atmosphere and dashes of Brazilian rhythms. Blonde Redhead have long had that sweeping wistful vibe down cold and it blows throughout Sit Down to Dinner. And while this is a particularly gentle-sounding album, it also somehow makes the shivers down your spine all the more pronounced, whether it’s the meticulously constructed, string-and-celeste-filled towering creation “Kiss Her Kiss Her,” or the melancholic instrumental “Via Savona” that closes the album. The band manage to spin what they do here in subtle new directions through the production, arrangements and occasionally the songwriting itself. Opener “Snowman,” with conga-fueled percussion punctuated by occasional hoots, has Amedeo taking lead vocals but Kazu soon joins in, igniting Blonde Redhead’s unique alchemy that cannot be quantified but sparkles through the whole record. “Snowman” is one of their best-ever songs, certainly from a production standpoint, but there are no weak ones here, be it the longing, folky “Not For Me” (another Amedeo-sung beauty), the trip-hoppy “Melody Experiment” and “If,” and the mesmerizing, haunting “Before.” Thirty years into their history, Blonde Redhead have delivered one of their best ever records, certainly their strongest since 23. It’s also a strong argument for sharing meals.
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Wilco – Cousin (dBpm Records)
Cate Le Bon breathes new life into Wilco’s familiar world on their most distinctive album in years
It’s been a long time since Wilco worked with an outside producer. Twenty years to be specific, when Jim O’Rourke produced Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born. For their 13th album, Jeff Tweedy made the lucky choice to work with Cate Le Bon who brings her distinct style to everything she does, including other artists’ records. Wilco do not bend to her influence as much as Devendra Banhart did, but Cousin stands out in the Chicago band’s deep catalog and you can definitely hear a little bit of Le Bon in every song. After asking Cate to produce their album — the process actually started before last year’s Cruel Country — Jeff Tweedy sent her around 40 songs, some of which had been around for years, and she picked 12 she liked. Tweedy and Le Bon worked together, stripping the songs back to the barest elements and then building them up again with the rest of the band at Wilco’s loft during the coldest months of winter 2022/2023. Cate sings, and plays bass and keyboards on the album and brought in her bandmate Euan Hinshelwood for skronky sax. You can hear Wilco and Le Bon’s worlds collide on a song like “Evicted,” where the chorus melody is textbook Tweedy, but then the shimmering guitar hook that follows is pure Cate Le Bon. The title track, though, is where her influence is felt most, using a handclap-powered jerking rhythm and heavily treated guitars that feel right off Le Bon’s 2016 album Crab Day, at least until some patented Tweedy-isms bubble up. But neither song feel like they would exist, at least in this form, under any other circumstances. “When we were listening back at the end, I think Mark from The Loft said it sounded like Wilco but with a different lighting director,” Cate told Uncut. “Which is a fair sum up of it.” For those who may have checked out of Wilco’s world in the last decade, Cousin is reason to check back in.
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Don Letts – Outta Sync (Cooking Vinyl)
The DJ, filmmaker and Big Audio Dynamite co-founder gets help from Wayne Coyne, Hollie Cook and more on his first-ever solo album
Don Letts is one of the most unimpeachably cool people in the world. He was the DJ at London’s 100 Club when it was the punk mecca, spinning reggae 45s and influencing everyone from John Lydon to Chrissie Hynde to Billy Idol; as a burgeoning filmmaker he documented The Clash around the world while making videos for Musical Youth, Ratt and The Pretenders; he co-formed pioneering ’80s group Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones (who’d been booted from The Clash) who mixed rock and roll with hip hop, reggae and dance music; and became a successful BBC DJ in the last 20 years. He’s pretty much done it all, except make a solo album which we have here. Working with producer/co-writer GAUDI and Killing Joke’s Youth, Outta Sync has Letts in his comfort zone, surrounded by notable friends and family. It’s an amenable album with flashes of fun and Letts’ quick wit but it could use a bit more of his rebel dread spirit. The record is also oddly sequenced, with some clunkers at the top but it does get cooking as it goes, with the fiery “Situationist” featuring Zoe Devlin Love, the sweet “No Fooling Me” featuring Hollie Cook, the ultra dubby “Wrong,” and the thoughtful “Civilization” which is a duet with his daughter, Honor Letts. (Wayne Coyne collab “Present Dilemmas” ends the album but doesn’t quite fit.) When the album was announced last year the tracklist included two collaborations with Terry Hall (who died in December), but the version of the album that’s out now — postponed five months from its original release date — finds Hall nowhere to be found. One song, “The Universe Knows What You’ve Done,” now features spoken word verses by John Cusack while “The Doorman” lists no guests. The latter, a very ’60s-ska sounding track, is one of the album’s best and was clearly custom built for Hall. What happened? Outta Sync an enjoyable but disappointingly middle-of-the-road record for a true iconoclast, but nothing it’s that could tarnish Letts’ cool.
Pick up a limited 7″ of the title track signed by Letts while they last.
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Melenas – Ahora (Trouble in Mind)
Third album from this motorik Spanish quartet is their best yet
Pamplona, Spain is mainly known as the city where the Running of the Bulls happens but four-piece Melenas are doing their best to give their hometown a kinder, gentler, and motorik makeover. With looping grooves, droning keyboards, angelic harmonies and loads of killer basslines, it’s easy to draw comparisons to Stereolab, but Melenas have their own unique pop instincts that make them singular. Just when you’re getting lost in their hypnotic spell, they hit you with a big hook, turning what was a speeding locomotive across a desert into a rollercoaster. And they keep getting better. Ahora is Melenas’ third album, refining what they do in clever, surprising and satisfying ways. Arrangements tend to let songs flower: “Dos pasajeros” (“Two Passengers”) is all swirling synth arpeggiations and harmonies against a gently ticking rhythm box but then goes widescreen with drums and a shift to a major key. It’s subtle but dramatic. Elsewhere there’s 1979-style synthpop (“Bang,” “Ahora”), confident jangle (“Tu y yo”) and luxurious lounge (“K2,” “Promesas”). Ahora finds a sweet spot between Neu! and Kraftwerk. Is there a Spanish word for “komishe”? It might be “Melenas.”
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Seablite – Lemon Lights (Mt.St.Mtn)
Second album from jangly San Francisco shoegazers is a real treat
Wish Lush were still together? San Francisco’s Seablite are carrying that shimmering, ethereal torch, mixing shoegaze with jangly C-86-style indie. It’s an appealing combination that isn’t exactly new, but this band — which includes Chime School’s Andy Pastalaniec
and former Wax Idols member Jen Mundy — do it very well. Lemon Lights is Seablite’s second album and it’s one jangly, hazy pop gem after another. Singer-guitarist Lauren Matsui and singer-bassist Galine Tumasyan nail the gossamer harmony style that really makes songs like “Melancholy Molly” and “Hit the Wall” soar, while the whole band take turns caressing and pummeling their instruments. The noisy songs are appropriately swirling in feedback, while the janglier numbers have real snap. Adding to the bona-fides: Ride’s Mark Gardner mastered this terrific record.
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Modern Nature – No Fixed Point in Space (Bella Union)
What if a forest could make music? It might go a little something like this…
Modern Nature leader Jack Cooper says with the group’s fourth album he “wanted the music to reflect nature: beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, process and chance. I wanted the music and the words to feel like roots, branches, mycelium, the intricacies of a dawn chorus, neurons firing, the unknown.” I would say that was Modern Nature’s whole ethos right from the start, with a gentle sound that feels born of improvisation — they are a jazz group as much as anything — but is also clearly studied and considered, a musical representation of nature in the wild with no humans in sight. Songs sound like vegetation pushing up through the soil to catch the light as the dew clings to the forest floor. Like on 2021’s Island of Noise, No Fixed Point in Space manages to capture the beauty, wonder and mystery of the natural world, observing and refracting it all through equally beautiful sounds.
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Ghost Train Orchestra & Kronos Quartet – Songs and Symphoniques: The Music of Moondog (Cantaloupe Music)
Influential composer and cult artist Moondog gets a fitting tribute with help from Jarvis Cocker, Marissa Nadler, Rufus Wainwright and more
Louis Hardin was better known as Moondog, a composer and poet, blind since childhood, who lived on the streets of New York City in the ’50s and ’60s. While often found on Sixth Avenue busking in a viking costume, reciting poetry and selling sheet music, his work was also highly influential with the new wave of modern composers from the era, including Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass (who took Moondog in to live with him at one point). Ghost Train Orchestra and Glass collaborators Kronos Quartet have teamed up for this tribute, reimagining Moondog’s compositions. There’s a real Hal Willner feel here as they’ve invited a bunch of cool collaborators to this very playful, fun party. Rufus Wainwright opens the album with “Be a Hobo,” Joan As Police Woman brings wonderful harmonies and mysterious atmosphere to “Why Spend a Dark Night with You” and Jarvis Cocker provides his patented British Sexy Whisper to the stately “I’m This, I’m That.” Best of all is “High On A Rocky Ledge” that blends indie rock with Kronos’ string arrangements and a spine-tingling lead vocal from Marissa Nadler. Other guests here include Petra Haden, Sam Amidon, and Aoife O’Donovan. Songs and Symphoniques stands on its own as an album but importantly also makes you want to learn more about the man known as Moondog.
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