Other artists I’m currently listening to are black midi, a band who plays punk with a progressive attitude – and some hot horns on it – and Idles, who are possibly the most important band to come out of Bristol in these last years. Ah, I wanna name also Fontaines DC, at least their first releases. Obviously all these musicians, along with others as Shame or Murder Capital – the less interesting to me, since they hide a lack of concreteness behind Flood production – are part of an interesting revival that remains such, even if with a lot of personality.
Anyway I can’t find not even such a thing as a revival right now in free jazz and improvised or experimental music. Obviously the great ancient musicians are still producing good stuff, but younger musicians, if there are some, are insanely hidden and I can’t find them. To tell the truth, some young or ‘new’ people is sending me music. A young guy from Italy sent me some audio files of what he calls an attempt to actualize Lettrism through electronics, but the final effect was sloppy and poor.
This is how younger musicians seem to me. But since I’m planning to write, as I did with Don Cherry, a retrospective on Anthony Braxton, I think it’s time to take some pause from wild experiments with a little bit of rock music tinged at various degrees with free jazz, and so here you’ll find some advices for your purchases. The first band I’ll talk about diffusely in this post are Algiers, from Atlanta, capital of the Georgia state.
They are a quartet composed by Franklin James Fisher (voice, guitar, piano, percussions, cello), Ryan Mahan (bass, percussions, piano, synthesizers, voice), Lee Tesche (guitar, loops, percussions, voice), and Matt Tong (drums, percussions, voice). Born as a trio at the beginning of the 2010s, Algiers are a politically conscious post punk band who in their career released four albums all under Matador Records.
Shook is possibly the most intriguing release you’ll find out this year. A shift in the territories of hip hop (Irreversible Damage) and electronica (Cold World), the music of this album is full of references to blues and gospel (Green Iris), free jazz (the sample of Nuclear War from Sun Ra with an electric bass superimposed), funk (I Can’t Stand It), and some incursions in the territories of punk music (A Good Man, 73%).
Far from being a music of pure rage, the songs contained in Shook will lead the listener to an inner voyage and to discover how creating a community can be the most assertive part of the work of a musician. The album is, indeed, also full of hosts, from Zack De La Rocha (Rage Against The Machine) to Big Rube (The Dungeon Family), from Patrick Shiroishi to Backxwash.
And if the so called post-punk revival started at the beginning of the new millennium with bands like Interpol, the acclaimed gurus of these last years are undoubtely the Idles, to whom even a movie, titled Don’t Go Gentle and directed by Mark Archer that I’ll attend to next week was dedicated in 2020. The same year Ultra Mono, in my opinion one of their most focused records, was published by Partisan, a label you’ll want to deepen as far as catalogue since PJ Harvey signed with them for her new release this July.
“How d’you like them clichés?” sings Joe Talbot in Mr Motivator and two things hit you: first, the band makes always the same music through their records – sometimes with more anger, sometimes more introspective – but second, it is always good music. Like the Ramones, never changing their three chords formula, Idles, composed by Talbot on vocals, Adam Devonshire on bass, Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan on guitars and Jon Beavis on drums, are able to build incredibly good songs without boring the listener.
And if the previous Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018) featured a song against toxic masculinity like Samaritans and a beautiful cover of Solomon Burke’s Cry To Me, the purchase of Ultra Mono (2020) is mandatory for those who love hear Jamie Cullum (sic!) introducing a punk song with his piano (Kill Them with Kindness), the violin of Warren Ellis from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds duelling with Colin Webster’s saxophone (Grounds), and to end a punk album with a tight and anthemic cover of True Love Will Find You In The End originally written by Daniel Johnson aptly renamed Danke.
But in general if you are interested in hearing a band chatted by the likes of Pearl Jam and the rock’n’roll gotha, Idles are the perfect act for you. Possibly live – they’re adding dates to their rich list. And if Idles are making everyone come to an agreement, not the same is possible to say about our next hosts on this blog: black midi. After their debut Schlagenheim (2019) they were compared to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Steven Edelstone on Paste, and hailed as the next big thing in the rock industry; black midi in the meantime have released three records different the one to the other.
While we obviously wait for their future releases, we can report also how part of the reviewers, at least here in Italy, have tried to bite the brake of enthusiasm underlying the fact that this music features solutions that in a way are oddly blasé – there are also some references to some of the classical Decca songwriters with their albums full of orchestral arrangements – and that Hellfire can be taken to the utmost as a good alternative to bands like Porcupine Tree with their loose and limp, and always equal to themselves, records.
Last band I’d like to give you advice about are Fontaines D.C., a nice group of musicians coming from Dublin and that since 2019, year the band released their first album Dogrel, issued three albums that are always more and more a mix of pop music and folk influences, with some clear limitations in the singing – Grian Chatten is great as a punk singer but pop music requires a different attitude. We won’t talk diffusely about them since there are no jazz tinges in their music but if you have ever been into Joy Division and The Clash you’ll for sure have to give these guys a chance.
Post-punk, as Simon Reynolds stressed enough through his 2010 book Rip It Up and Start Again, was possibly the last effort, before Slint, Gastr del Sol, June of ’44, Goodspeed! You Black Emperor and others in the 2000s, to create a music coming from popular basis but open to contaminations with different elements, from free jazz to avant garde, from dub to ethnic tinges. It was also a music in opposition to bourgeois and conservative values. It is not strange this music is living a revival in our confused times.
Hope you’ll enjoy this music even if it is not completely bathed in free jazz because it is vital and interesting. I still remember how much protest letters came to the desk of The Wire after their interview to Sunn O))), but interestingly enough movie director Jim Jarmusch, for whom music is important throughout his movies and as part of his creative process, after using musicians related to the avant garde as The Lounge Lizards or Mulatu Astatké deepened the relationship of images and sound through the music of Wu Tang Clan and Boris, showing how overcoming close-mindedness can be a victory for creativity.
This is also why I’m happy to host these musicians on my blog. If you want to enlarge your discographies without completely betraying jazz, but widening its language, these bands are here for you. They will also help you to live more the present time and its tensions. Hope in the future they also will be of incitement for younger generations of free jazz and avant garde players not to loose both wickedness and self consciousness, commitment and fantasy. It is also a reminder to myself not to fossilize into a single genre since music is out there and it’s good in every shape and form.
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