In yet another example of songs that appear in my iTunes and I have no idea when or how they arrived (I think I acquire music during my “blackouts,” as my therapist calls them), I ran across Solillaquists of Sound. And my reaction is that I’m pissed it has taken me so long to discover these guys. I mean…this is from 2009. There’s just too much music, folks. Everyone just needs to take a break with the making music nonsense because I can’t catch up. Anyway, where was I–oh yes. The song kicks off with Swamburger, continues to kick off, then when Alexandrah fires up about 1:35 in…it’s kind of all over at that point. If you’re not on board at that point, then I don’t know what you want from life, people. The rest of the album, No More Heroes, is more of the same inspired madness. Having seen the music video for this, I’d just like to add that whatever coffee producer DiViNCi enjoys…I want some. Find their site here, their Facebook here, and all their music on their Bandcamp page.
So…you know what’s fun? Taking musical ideas and mashing them up together to see what comes out. Here we have musicians from Kenya and the UK joining forces for The Owiny Sigoma Band. It’s the Luo musical tradition, which is something I’ve never heard of before (see above gripe about too much music), and which Google searches show is either a tribe, a grouping of genres, music sung in a particular language…or some combination thereof. I encourage anybody who knows more to school me on this, since now I’ve had a sampling of this, I obviously need more. This is “Vitamin C,” from the compilation Brownswood 10 Versions–Brownswood is the label of Gilles Peterson. The groove on this track is positively infectious. You can find that compilation here as well as their Facebook, and their own Bandcamp page.
Next, we go to Chicago for Bottle Tree and “Whereabouts Unknown,” a track that combines great vocals, a splash of psychedelia and then rhythms that I have no idea how they combine with everything else to work. One thing that bugs me is when you have vocals that are being sunk/spoken over music…and it’s like the person in question can’t hear the music…or can hear it and just doesn’t care. But that’s not what’s happening here…it sounds like it’s about to slide that direction and then nope. Everything slides into place and it’s just an excellent lazy groove. I say lazy…no doubt it’s lazy like a serene duck just coasting across the water. You can snag their self-titled album from their Bandcamp here.
Yes, it’s true: English band Hot Chip probably needs no intro. And yes, it’s also true: this is from their last album, Why Make Sense?, back in 2015. But what’s also true is that I’m still doing a deep dive on the entire discographies of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane, so…yeah, we’re back to the subject of catching up again. This track, “White Wine and Fried Chicken,” is just sort of simple and wonderful. The Definitive Version of the album is available here.
In other catchup news, I was listening to Frank Oz’s episode from the Desert Island Discs Archive. One of the artists he chose multiple times was Mose Allison, and yup, all of a sudden there was another artist who I needed to snag his entire discography. Especially since he seems to have influenced everybody under the sun. Turns out he only just passed away back in 2016. This is “Lost Mind”–see if you don’t concur with Mr. Oz about this quality. More Mose than you can shake a stick at is here.
Last, but certainly not least, everyone’s favorite badass Italian retro-soundtrackmongers Calibro 35 have a new album coming out on February 9th: Decade, seeing as how they’re ten years old. I say “retro-soundtrackmongers” because they started off redoing Italian movie soundtracks and then kept on going, with their original works being the sort of things that you want to write something that it could be the soundtrack for. This is “SuperStudio” from the new album. Here’s their official site and their Facebook and you can pre-order the album here.
