DEAD BANDITS, ANNA CALVI PEAKY BLINDER AND KIM GORDON DO THE BUSINESS IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY

Belated welcomes to the new year in music. Am only just locating the new-tunes mojo after winter hibernation (and we’re not out of it yet but more on that, maybe, in a different blog, possibly) so let’s just plunge right in to this clutch of groundshaking 2024 newbies.   

KIM GORDON – Bye Bye

Kim Gordon reads a list of things. 

And?
And sets it to a depth charge called BASS. With one-note piano jabs, noise guitar influx and agitating keyboard chaospheres thrown together with cut-up panache, Bye Bye compels and arrests with a contemporary weight that almost defies belief. A controlled explosion of art rock and industrial hip hop beats. 

Kim Gordon reads a list of things.
Best thing you’ll hear this week? Yes.
BYE BYE. 

DEAD BANDIT – Memory Thirteen

Instrumental heavy warmth is the order of the night for Dead Bandit’s Memory Thirteen, its brushy drum shuffle positively inviting you into wherever brushy drum shuffles hang. Exploratory guitars draw on Mogwai’s cleaner panoramic angles but the bass here is looser and dirtier. The whole thing teases a climactic Rock eruption but it never arrives. Instead, Dead Bandit deliver a neat triple-time groove that moves in and passes by, just out of reach.    

ANNA CALVI AND NICK LAUNAY – Miquelon 

If a gothic garage band escaped their four-walled space and wound up playing some sort of wild west Americana drone and chant, Miquelon would be their name. The riff in this loose, bass-bending, ritualistic stomp made Anna Calvi’s fingers bleed from the hard playing she hit it with but look where Miquelon ended up – Peaky Blinders soundtrack.

Right, that’s it for now – a short, word-rusty Rewind but the tunes excelled. As always.

‘til next time!