Starring
Downstairs People, English Teacher, The Innocence Mission, Ramirez Exposure, Simon Fisher Turner, Wren Hinds
The Front Runners
This Could Be Texas : English Teacher
Belatedly, I’ve caught up with English Teacher, winners of the 2024 Mercury Prize. It’s an impressive album and a worthy winner.
In my mind English Teacher and The Last Dinner Party emerged at the same time. The buzz around them was similarly positive and loud. If not as closely entwined as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones or Oasis and Blur, they’re certainly competitors for the title of best new band in Britain today.
At first hearing they occupy a similar space, a space shared with the likes of Dry Cleaning, Wet Leg and Self Esteem. English Teacher are at once familiar and carving out their own niche. If The Last Dinner Party are fun and the modern equivalent of Sparks, then English Teacher are more thoughtful and varied like Peter Gabriel’s Genesis.
At first hearing I thought this was an album I wanted to listen to, without going ‘“Wow”. It’s a grower though, full of multi part songs with elements that worm their way into your brain. These songs aren’t conventionally catchy, but you’ll want to hear them again. They stretch out to cover the distance between indie rock and prog.
Although singer Lily Fontaine takes centre stage, all the band contribute their significant strengths. She talks and sings her way through each song thoughtfully, wide eyed but certain and realistic. Bass lines are fluid, guitars bring jaggedness to the party where required, percussion provides the driving energy. It’s a rich assortment so it comes as no surprise to learn that they met and formed at Leeds Conservatoire. It also means that this album sounds fully formed, not at all like a debut.
They’re full of surprises. On hearing the first saxophone squeal on ‘Broken Biscuits’ you’ll wonder where it has appeared from. Seconds later you’ll wonder where it’s taking you. Risks are taken, safe routes are shown the door. ‘This Could Be Texas’ is almost symphonic in its multi part structure. The male vocals on ‘Sideboob’ come as if from a dream and the slow build and swell of ‘You Blister My Paint’ is simply wonderful.
Over the course of 50 minutes, English Teacher set out their wares and make something that qualifies as truly mesmerising.
Taster Track : You Blister My Paint
For Love Of Things Invisible : Ramirez Exposure
With Marc Jonson, Ramirez Exposure released one of 2024’s most feel good records (‘Turning On The Century Vol 2’). This solo outing shows that it was no fluke, and he played a large part in that
Rarely does a performer ooze as much love for their craft as you can hear in this short set of classic, timeless pop. You can’t help but like it, and you’ll smile delightedly all the way through.
Take the spirit of 50s rock and roll, the carefree, gorgeous melodies and harmonies of the 60s, the DIY ethic of the 70s and the sweetness of adolescent holiday romance. Ramirez Exposure mixes it together and makes something irresistible.
It may be a master stroke to release this in the middle of January. That’s when you need warmth and sunshine most. They drip from every track here. This is music for the best times as you remember them. It’s the soundtrack to a dream you don’t want to end, a dream that leaves you with a fuzzy warmth and love for the world. It’s music for the third summer of love.
It only added to the appeal that Ramirez sings in English with a faint Spanish accent. That’s the touch of something exotic needed to transport you from the grey, foggy weather of a UK winter.
If there’s one element to extract and bottle it’s the harmonies. They’re beautifully arranged, particularly on ‘Ended’ and the standout track ‘Love Radiates Around’. They make the album something special.
As with any holiday, it’s bittersweet when it comes to an end and so it is with this album.
Taster Track : Love Radiates Around
The Chasing Pack
DSP : Downstairs People
Here we have electronic RnB with hip hop beats and a dark threatening feel. It’s effective and powerful but it’s not a feel good record.
And that’s surprising because on line Downstairs People’s music is described as aural serotonin. For most people that means our feel good hormones. Look a little closer though and you see that it is the body’s mood regulator. These songs seem to stabilise your mood at the lowest point before you become completely unreceptive so that you can start to climb from your bad place.
This album is all about the vibe and the vibe is down and heavy. It’s late night music and slightly disturbed, carrying the threat and disorientation of those moments when you’re woken from a deep sleep by the memory of a sound you didn’t hear. This is music for the bad times.
It may be the soundtrack for you if you’re suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome, that condition where you fall for your abductor because you have no one else to trust. The whispers of ‘Codes’ sound like a conspiracy of voices that you can’t be sure are on your side. You have to trust this music and give yourself to it completely, a leap of faith that, despite the darkness, your recovery from your lowest point starts here.
The songs are full of subdued bass beats, quiet but urgent and breathless vocals, slow electronic washes and little by way of uplifting melody. They’re certainly listenable though. Despite its downward spiralling I can hear its appeal. Massive Attack and Faithless have ventured into similar territory.
All is not lost though. ‘Cannes Thing’ gives the first glimpse of a way out in the motif playing above the beats. It continues in ‘Show You’ which is almost sung. It’s not much but those small steps are enough to lighten the gloom and point a way out of the darkness.
January may not be the best time to listen to this album. It’s hard enough as it is. File it away though for when you need a reminder that bad times will end and good times will come at least a little closer.
Tater Track : Cannes Thing’
Midwinter Swimmers : The Innocence Mission
Lo-fi and melancholy, the Innocence Mission have produced an album of rare, heartaching beauty.
From the opening notes of ‘The Thread Is A Green Street’ you feel that you’re in the presence of a trembling and quavering vulnerability. It’s a start that has you holding your breath, tense for the moment when tears start to fall silently. This is lo fi magic, generating an atmosphere that will define the whole album.
There’s a ghostly feel at play. It’s a hushed affair as if it’s recorded in an abandoned, old sanctuary as the world disintegrates around you. Its melodies are like memories, almost but not quite there. I had an unexpected image of the band on the Titanic playing their last notes, bravely aware that from tragedy and darkness they were providing the last flickering embers of goodness.
Karen Peris’ vocals are a fundamental part of this. They are cracked but unbroken, and quietly strong. They sound like those of a little girl who has grown up as a survivor. Her voice cries folk with Belle and Sebastian and The Reds, Pinks and Purples’ influences. The structure of the album appears more classical, like a song cycle.
The feeling is of something special but perhaps a little earnest. If there’s a flaw in the tapestry that’s been woven it’s the lack of lightness and respite for the listener. Its melancholy is all consuming and quite intense.
This is an album that, once heard, won’t be forgotten for all the right reasons.
Taster Track : The Thread Is A Green Street
Instability of the Signal : Simon Fisher Turner
Simon Fisher Turner has come a long, long way since his days as a solo 70s teen star and 80s indie popper with King of Luxembourg. His electronica takes us, eventually, to a gentle place via a difficult and unsettling journey.
One of my personal stresses comes from being on a long walk and not knowing how much further there is to go. This album feels like a journey you can’t break into stages so you don’t know when you can leave it behind.
This is experimental and improvised music that will keep you on your toes. It’s not long into the opening track 'Barefoot' that I physically jumped. The feeling is that while you’ve slept, you’ve been transported to the middle of a dense jungle. When you awake, you have no bearings and you’re governed by your reactions to random, hidden sounds. ‘I Can’t Hear Anything’ is full of anxiety and stressed whispers and sums up the situation.
You can’t think of Turner as a musician. He’s an electronic auteur with a cinematic ability to build tension. This is challenging music. It’s highly impressive without being enjoyable, clever but at the expense of pushing you away. Eventually we end with what is by far the gentlest track on the album, ‘Bless Your Hands (Part 1 and 2)’. The journey is over. You’ve survived it, but I bet you didn’t expect that was in store when you set out.
Unusually for such a strongly electronic album, Turner has a great voice. He’s not afraid to use it. It doesn’t need to be protected, disguised or boosted by the electronica. The production too is impeccably clean and clear.
Turner is a highly productive (and, if I’m honest, provocative) musician. In his various guises he’s averaged nearly an album a year for fifty years. He has no social media presence so what you hear is what you get from him. It’s likely he’ll still be releasing music as the end of the world approaches. It will be a fitting soundtrack.
Taster Track : I Can’t Hear Anything
Don’t Die In The Bundu - Wren Hinds
On the surface, these songs are from the classic singer songwriter mould but below the surface there’s something deeper and stranger going on.
This is traditional singer songwriting in sound and feel, and in seeming to come from a long way back. Wren Hinds may have grown up on the South African coast but these songs are not influenced by African sounds and rhythms. There’s barely a beat to be heard. As the album progresses though there’s an undeniable shift from the heartfelt acoustica of the sensitive male to something more dreamlike and fashioned by the deep mystic truths contained in the land and its culture. Songs such as ‘The Garden’ and ‘Gilded By The Sun, Silvered By The Moon’ move on from the merely simple to something more spine tingling.
Without shouting, these songs command your attention, drawing you into their world. The effect is similar to the trance-like state occasioned by watching an impossibly long train crossing wide open spaces. At its heart though this is one man with his guitar and a few eerie embellishments.
These are songs with the squeaky guitar strings of intimacy (‘A Song’). They are good songs with pretty tunes. It’s music that tends to hide away in cluttered corners but when you discover them it’s like discovering something special that you thought was lost forever. They’re melancholy, a little wistful and they sound as if they’re remembered from far away in space or time.
There’s a little of Villagers’ Conor O’Brien in Hinds’ voice. There was also a strong call back to one particular song by Rayland Baxter - ‘Without Me’. Give it a listen if you like this.
Wren Hinds is a voice that deserves to be heard and savoured.
Taster Track : A Song
As ever this week's Taster Track playlists can be accessed at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/42qDXrw3nLMlCSg45kCnRy?si=4499207642034207 or via the Spotify link on the Home Page.
The link to the Youtube playlist is https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwV-OogHy7EjHZr5_M3m0Zn5LEu_F3fMm&si=OhQF-ZPaBjUn4VMT
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