Three albums that sit rather well together on one page, three albums we’ve been rather enjoying during the first month of the year. You know our policy by now, we only really cover something when we think it worth your time and ours. We are picky…

JozefVan Wissem – The Night Dwells In The Day (Incunabulum) – This is something rather rewarding, something rather different, something that takes a little more time to reveal just how good it really is. Don’t be giving it the usual online couple of minutes before you move on to the next big thing, there’s a little more than just the standard fifteen Warholian megabites required here. The Night Dwells in the Day is rather beguiling, a beautifully peaceful album – an album and a body of work at ease with itself, it does glow but there’s more to it than the things initially revealed  This is the work of Dutch lute player and composer Jozef Van Wissem, it is kind of foreboding at times, brooding in a magnificent kind of way, folk-flavoured, chamber music, mostly instrumental – do we get to mention Lankum here? – When there are vocals then they are almost unexpected and arrive perfectly for the first time a little way into the nine wonderful minutes this is The Call of The Deathbird – shadowy figures that introduce the beautiful tones of Hillary Wood. Kind of want to say this is a delicate body of work, deliciously fragile, it isn’t though, it might feel delicate but that feeling here really is one of the album’s many strengths. These are beautifully evocative atmospheres, this is a strong album, quietly powerful,  building without ever needing to build that much. The pacing is perfect, as are the textures, the listener is easily held. Highly recommended.  

Bandcamp / website

The Smile – Wall Of Eyes (XL Recordings) – Isn’t everything, but everything,  just awesome these days? If by ‘everything’ we mean books, movies, gastropubs, but most of all, music.  We swim in a cultural rip tide of astoundings and unmissables, every poster spattered with four or five stars, every advert smeared with gushing quotes. What spectacular times we must live in, what envy from future historians, gazing down the aeons at such riches. It all peaks too soon. And then something comes along – in this case, music, an album – that truly deserves swooning over, and genuinely awes, and nobody’s going to believe the reviewer.

The Smile are all caught in dragnets and the more I think about them, the bigger they become, not in terms of their success or their stature, but in terms of the art they make. That time in the afternoon sunshine in the park in East London before Nick Cave was about to be so religious, that afternoon in the sun just gets bigger and when the time is right and the opinion or the story goes or grows or is it the way you read the room? Waited a few days before playing this album for the first, it had to be ritual, it had to be the right time and now here it is, sometime after midnight in a quite room, dark outside, peaceful, paint brush in mouth, with the studio door open and the still of the last night of January, listening ot the new album for the first time. 

And how big is Read The Room, that’s the first really really big moment of the album, Read The Room and if there was a musician here she’d tell me they were doing this or that, but I don’t really want to know the mechanics and the only thing it really puts me in mind of is that very underrated Discipline era of King Crimson’s but this isn’t an album to point at other albums, this isn’t an album that needs reference points and this review needs a full stop now. It is something to just go with, grow with, glow with, walk with, never run, Wall of Eyes is not an album that ever needs to run, or push, it really is an album that can go anywhere, just got to turn itself inside out, back to front. 

Under Our pillows is going somewhere they haven’t before and then we’re back to those cut out shapes and that building thing they do that falls through four hundred holes or where did it go? Into somebody’s pocket? They never have sounded like anyone other than themselves (and Radiohead of course) but then It doesn’t really matter where this fits in terms of Radiohead or indeed anything else and I guess they believe in an altered state?  That was a whooosh moment, right there, or so said a Friend of A Friend. And where did it go? All the loose change?

It is clever, it is progressive, properly so, maybe too clever? No, never too clever, it is challenging, challenging themselves more than a need to challenge us, it is an album that respects the audience. Just found myself thinking of Fela Kuti and what Ginger Baker would think of it? Would he approve, would he grump a nod of grudging respect? It does all kind of stay in the same place, the same pace, the same grace, it is graceful, it kind of glides and and here comes a song that’s been in our heads since they played it in the sunshine of 2022 in the park. 

You wonder how they could get so isolated, how they can manage to make an album like this with all that’s going on around them and around us all and I swear I’m seeing double and Bending Hectic almost feels like an old friend and if they have something to say they need to say it now. And there’s that bit where he lets go of the wheel and grasping for a word, for words.

And then there’s closing track You Know Me! But you really don’t know, is this still them? Where did all the sunlight come from? Yes this is still them, a real smile, but it is a little different, a little unexpected And there it all was, what an excellent end. and off we go agaim, play it again right now…

We’re going around a second time now, the second play and the first of the details are starting to reveal themselves, you sense there’s more (and more and more) to come in the next days and weeks. I mean there are bands that could be referenced, there’s a bit that passed not so long ago that was pure 5uu’s and that bit there kind of tastes of, but it doesn’t matter, that’s not what this is about,and no, it isn’t depressing, I’ve heard that being offered in terms of The Smile and, it is actually obtusely uplifting, affirming, at least encouraging, it forces you to turn, to smile. Second time around and You Know Me starts in such a delicious way, such an unexpected way even though it is the second time. You know Me is just beautiful (and I should probably add that I’ve never been that big a Radiohead fan) and I am feeling a lot of Beatles and I am aware that that is a silly thing to say, and we are 55 years almost to the day away from that last performance on the roof, and that moment just there at the end of it all, at the end of the album, that silence, that couple of seconds, those are precious moments, brief moments to grab it all and well no, not go again, this is a special album, it can’t be over played, not something this good…

Bandcamp / Website

 

C. Diab – Imerro (Tonal Union) – This is a rather effortless, graceful, expressive, warm. Slow-moving instrumental evocations, Imerro is a beautiful album that has all the time in the world t o take you where you want to go, an album that will slow you down, to stop and just you know, kind of bask in it. This just might be multi-instrumentalist Caton Diab’s finest work yet.

“Imerro was recorded over six days in late July/early August 2021 at Risque Disque Studio in Cedar, BC, during that summer’s unprecedented second “heat dome”, which saw temperatures soaring to over 40 degrees. “The idea behind this record was simply ecstatic improvisation, to place myself and engineer Jonathan Paul Stewart (Paul) in an area with minimal distraction and provide myself space for creation with little thematic pretence, with the belief that music “shows it’s face” as you move along, an instrument being a kind of lightning rod for sonics already existing, and any sonic subject in this session should present itself rather than composing upon hard preconceived notions”, says Caton.

Graceful bow work, warm and inviting, and when I  said effortless earlier I really didn’t mean on his part, I mean effortless in terms of the listener, although attention to the detail is rewarding, as fine as it is as background music, don’t let it be just that. it feels like late night, it works at any time, the peaks are gentle, the bends subtle, the rhythmical flow just right, when the banjo comes in and adds another layer to something that was already just right…  

Bandcamp / links