With Daughter Of Swords, Maria Somerville, Bon Iver, Self Esteem, Paddy Hanna, Lullahush and others.
An overview of my recommended albums for listening from the month of April.
As ever, I’m always listening through a big list of releases that is neverending. The albums below are the ones that I’ve enjoyed so far.
Daughter Of Swords – Alex
Alex Sauser-Monnig was one third of the American traditional a capella group Mountain Man, and their second album as Daughter Of Swords is a bubbly knotty collection of songs – with fuzzy guitar, tangy synths and saxophone.
I wasn’t familiar with the debut album Dawnbreaker, but I’m gathering it was a lot more dreamy folk music than this bright indie pop record. It was recorded in North Carolina, and features old Mountain Man pal Amelia Meath, along with her Sylvan Esso partner Nick Sanborn, TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry), Jenn Wasner (of Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes) and Caleb Wright (Hippo Campus, Samia).
Alex arrived at the songs on the record after an interrogation with their inner thought processes, relationships between art, creativity and other people, late-capitalism’s effect on working cultural practitioners, and coming to a new place of understanding of their gender.
Favourite tracks – Morning In Madison’ / ‘Talk To You’ / ‘Hard On’’
Maria Somerville – Luster
The long-awaited second album from Connemara artist and NTS radio host Maria Somerville finds the music moving further into a fog, a shoegaze, nu-gaze dreamy pop style that recalls the best of the label she now calls home – 4AD.
Luster features collaborators Ian Lynch of Lankum, Henry Earnest, Róisín Berkeley, Olan Monk, Margie Jean Lewis, Finn Carraher McDonald (aka Nashpaints) and producers J. Colleran, Brendan Jenkinson and Diego Herrera aka Suzanne Kraft but all serve the album’s core mistiness.
It’s all beautifully hazy stuff, white flashes of swirling pedal rock texture, layered ambient choral undulations and on Stereolab-esque tones on ‘Violet’.
Favourite tracks – ‘Stonefly’ / ‘Violet’ / ‘Projections
Self Esteem – A Complicated Woman
“I’m not complaining / I’m whinging in a new way”.
It took me few listens to get into the followup album to Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s smash breakthrough album Prioritise Pleasure. A Complicated Woman has a difficult task of presenting a fresh chapter in Taylor’s confessional heart-on-sleeve relatability, and yes, it doesn’t always work.
A Complicated Woman is filled is with female voices and choirs that lends the album initially, a feeling of being bashed over the ears with big feelings, but subsequent plays, allow the listener wander in beneath its grandiosity to hear some more vulnerable relatable moments that sustain.
By streamlining her personality into more universal empowering choruses, the record loses some of the diaristic pull that made Prioritise Pleasure such a compelling listen. And it does so by casting those simultaneously affirming yet self-doubting songs into bigger pop, electronic and vocal moments.
“If I’m so empowered / why am I such a coward?”
Flashes of Taylor’s personality dotted throughout means the album’s anthemic choruses generally feel earned rather than pandering sloganeering, though it is perhaps a little too reliant on the power of strings on a lot of tracks to stir those BIG feelings.
Still, no one is exploring their own dual sense of self in their songs more openly than Rebecca Lucy Taylor, no matter the mess spilled. Self Esteem doesn’t have the answers but she is doing the work.
Favourite songs: ‘Logic Bitch’ / ‘Focus Is Power’ / “Cheers To Me’
Self Esteem is on tour in September and October.
Bon Iver – Sable, Fable
Justin Vernon’s is in a happier mood on his fifth album turning his textured indie rock into a soulful declaration of love and rebirth. Featuring Danielle Haim, Dijon and Flock Of Dimes, Sable, Fable feels like a new chapter for the Bon Iver project.
Its warm inviting soulful music has welcomed me back in since it was released. I’ve essentially been skipping the opening previously released EP that serves as disc one of the record.
Favourite songs: ‘Everything Is Peaceful Love’ / ‘There’s A Rhythm’ / ‘If Only I Could Wait’ (with Danielle Haim’)
Paddy Hanna – Oylegate
Dublin singer-songwriter Paddy Hanna gave up music in the couple of years before this album was made. Family and friends convinced him to keep at it, and producer and collaborator Daniel Fox also encouraged this fifth album, after a trad-style album was abandoned. And we are glad he was convinced to come back to it.
Oylegate was written while watching Solaris with the sound off at home, on piano and it features Hanna’s trademark classic songwriting-tinged craft, and the superlative ‘Harry Dean’ and ‘Oylegate Station’ – songs that have a “contrast of warmth and detachment, of intimate revelation and surreal detour.”
Paddy’s Irish Festivals shows this summer include When Next We Meet and Beyond the Pale.
Paddy Hanna: a track-by-track on Oylegate – his new album that nearly never got made
Favourite songs: ‘ ‘Harry Dean’ / ‘Oylegate Station. / ‘Tucson Arizona’
Lullahush – ithaca
The Irish producer Daniel McIntyre’s Ithaca album explores Irish traditional culture through the lens of a digital workstation interface, applying electronic sensibilities and techniques to ancient instrument sounds.
Often feeling like an exploratory collage of the source material and its modern cousin, Ithaca is a busy and fizzy album that feels like its excavating the walls between then and now, finding a liminal place for the two practices of music to co-exist.
Irish traditional melodies are processed and bent to a digital space, further developing the renewal of interest in traditional sounds in recent years her, and the presence of Saileog Ní Cheannabháin ( ‘An Droighneán Donn’), Maija Sofia ( ‘Jimmy An Chladaigh’ / ”Maija an Uisce’) and recordings of Irish keening as on last year’s essential Irish release Mo Léan by Róis.
Favourite tracks: ‘Jimmy An Chladaigh’ / ‘Maggie na bhFlaitheas’ / ‘An Droighneán Donn’
Other Albums I’m enjoying this month.
Real Lies – We Will Annihilate Our Enemies
English electronic duo known for their euphoric-thumped vignettes of the hedonistic and personal experiences of moving through life with a poet’s insight. This is the band’s third album of heart-on-sleeve dancefloor revelation moody synth highs.
Sault – 10
Yet another fine surprise release from the UK soul and R&B collective.
2hollis – star
internet rapper and producer du jour Hollis Frazier-Herndon’ aka 2hollisfourth album is filled withsubgenre trap / 8-bit hyperpop / club bass / hooky dance pop, that feels inevitable to catapult the long-standing underground producer to a greater consciousness.
Indopan – In Opulence
Andrew Morrison is best known as The Cyclist or Buz Ludzha but released a 70-minute album from his Indopan moniker called In Opulence, a suite of “jazzy kinetics, lysergic breaks, and dusted swing” inspired by a recent analogue instrument hall (Wurlitzer 206A, Korg Polysix, and an analog Soviet drum brain called the Marsh UDS).
While the rest of his music is known for its “tape-throb” feel, Indopan is more spiritually minded, and two songs on the record feature the voice of Cork’s Elaine Howley (‘Shore Ellipsis’ and ‘Antigreed’).
Jinx Lennon – The Hate Agents Leer At The Last Isle Of Hope
The Dundalk punk poet outsider artist’s fourteenth studio album features 26 songs with titles like ‘BMW’s Don’t Like Bikes’, ‘Mad For Mass’, ‘Stop Hiding Behind The Flag’, ‘Bouncy Castle Catholics’, ‘Unwanted Attention In The Gym’, ‘Pub Drama’ and ‘Music Is My Alcohol’.
The album features “songs about modern life in Ireland the madness and the magic of it and the belief in song and the good crusade of the van on the road spreading the tunes as far as we can go.”
What albums are you enjoying? Join our Discord community with a Patreon membership and discuss albums with us.
