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With his Experiment band, Robert Glasper has been mashing up jazz, hip-hop, soul, and rock for some time now. In 2012, with vocalist/saxophonist Casey Benjamin, drummer Mark Colenburg, and bassist Derrick Hodge, he put out the band’s first Black Radio album and their first Grammy followed. The album includes the Erykah Badu collaboration ‘Afro Blue’. Transcendent vibes.
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John Murry has quite the back story, including being a relative of William Faulkner, having a violent childhood and heroin addiction. The singer-songwriter from Tupelo, Mississippi, draws on all of it for his 2012 opus LP The Graceless Age. The album reaches its peak with ‘Southern Sky’ with all of its conversational snippets, string arrangements, fuzzed-up guitars and female backing vocals.
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Good evening. For a short time in the late ’70s, three Cleveland-based singers worked with soul journeyman Lou Ragland (pictured), but their output never saw the light of day. Lily Pearson, Annette Warren and Avetta Henry did not abandon the collaboration until after they rehearsed and recorded six tracks with Ragland on bass and Hot Chocolate’s Tony Roberson on drums. In 2012, the Chicago reissue label Numero Group unearthed and released their recordings as as part of their Eccentric Soul series. ‘Guess I Always Knew’ is my favourite cut from the short-lived Love Apple project. Have a great week.
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Good morning. Nostalgia for the 1990s is a well trodden inspiration. A decade ago, Scottish band PAWS released their debut album Cokefloat! and the single ‘Sore Tummy’. Featuring Big Deal’s Alice Costelloe on vocals, the sound is pure riff-heavy alt rock from a couple of decades before. Have a great week.
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A decade ago, Daniel Rossen released material originally intended for his band Grizzly Bear’s next album. The EP was called Silent Hour / Golden Mile. One of the tracks, ‘Silent Song’ and its slide guitar arrangement sounds like it would fit very neatly on George Harrison’s 1970 album All Things Must Pass. Harrison meets Grizzly Bear, say.
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Hi, I’ve recently revisited Grizzly Bear’s 2012 album release Shields. It opens with the distinctive, angular ‘Sleeping Ute‘. Then, nestled further into the album is the sweeping ‘Yet Again’. Where Ute reminded me of Cream-ear Clapton, this song has overtures of GB’s contemporaries The National and Coldplay – but in a good way.
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Good morning. Before Chris Owens announced in 2012 that he would be leaving Girls to pursue a solo career, Owens and JR White had had a productive run of 5 years and two studio albums, including 2011’s Father, Son, Holy Ghost. The Californian duo hadn’t spoken for years when White unexpectedly died last year at home in Santa Cruz. For that reason, Father, Son.. should be shrink wrapped and filed under indie classic. The fifth track on the album, ‘My Ma’ is about Owens’ Mother, with whom he had a complicated relationship. In fact Owens is a story all by itself. He was born into the religious cult The Children of God. He was given his first guitar by “Child of God” Jeremy Spencer, a founding member of Fleetwood Mac. After escaping the cult, rough sleeping followed before he was adopted by mentor and philanthropist, Stanley Marsh III… Have a great weekend.
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Also in 2012, Matt Walker (aka DJ Julio Bashmore) released ‘Au Seve’ on his own Bristol-based label Broadwalk Records. Listening to it again today, it clearly paved the way for certain deep house anthems with incredibly simple and catchy melodies. The release of Ninetoes’ ‘Finder‘ and Ten Walls’ ‘Walking With Elephants‘ in subsequent years immediately come to mind. Basic but effective. Bashmore lifts the vocal sample from The Real Thing’s ‘You To Me Are Everything’ (Decade Remix ’76-’86). Good find in the uncool section of the record store.
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Speaking of a hard-to-categorise artist, Montreal-based Claire Boucher was still in the full throws of project cyborg-pop when she became a bona fide pop star. Her third studio album Visions features real creativity and sounded so different to anything else out there in 2012. ‘Genesis’ was released as the lead single off the album… pop, electronica, Eastern influence. Of course.
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Despite its title, 2 was Mac DeMarco’s first proper full length album. Within this collection of goofy nuggets is ‘My Kind of Woman’, which would set the tone and feel of the Canadian’s music over the next couple of years.
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The title track off Kendra Morris’s 2012 album Banshee closes out her debut. 6 years after Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black and a year after her untimely death, her heady embrace of rock, jazz and contemporary R&B was being acted out in the works of others. NYC-based Morris originally hailed from St. Petersburg, Florida.
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I seldom reach for the R&B, but exception must be made for Frank Ocean’s album channel ORANGE. This is the third track off the LP I’ve featured since the its release in 2012 – and it’s probably the standout single. In part, that’s because ‘Thinkin Bout You’ kicks off the album – the minimal beat and waves of synthesiser provide the Californian with the perfect lead-off for his particular vocal workout.
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Now to another American heavily influenced by glam rock’s finest. In 2012, Interpol’s lead man, Paul Banks, released his solo album Banks. One of its songs, ‘Over My Shoulder’, plays like Interpol singing Bowie and I like it. In 2005, Interpol had become one of a small number of NYC bands (incl. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio) that were put on a pedestal as one of those “Bowie bands”, after the legend explicitly endorsed their work. Banks’ thanks is evident.
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To some, Sigur Rós’s sixth album Valtari (Icelandic for steamroller) is a self parody; to others it was a return to the somber and quirky soundscapes that had made them such a post-rock crossover success. ‘Varðeldur’ (Icelandic for campfire) is the sound of a fragile and lonely piano, with the loop of some sort of string accompaniment and distant vocals. As for the video, a campfire would have been an interesting distraction.
Samuelsounds 