Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 64 i Under the Radar

When Héloïse Letissier emerged on the international stage as Christine and the Queens, via a spell-binding dance routine to her breakthrough single “Titled,” she appeared like a pop-star from a bygone-era. Quiet, bookish, and altogether unassuming, the French singer was the sort of artist you could walk past every day and never recognize. The demure persona was not an accident. “The first record was me trying to escape the male gaze, if I could. Very buttoned-up, quite a neutral way of existing,” she says. “But I was failing at it because every comment I was reading under my videos was still ‘would I fuck this girl?’ rather than focusing on what I had to say.” However, on the extensive promotional campaign for her debut, Chaleur Humaine (re-titled simply Christine and the…

Stephen Malkmus begins his sixth album with The Jicks with a surprise. Having spent much of his post-Pavement career re-establishing the guitar solo at the center of his craft, the one-time golden boy of indie rock kicks off Sparkle Hard with a plaintive piano ballad. Opening with a simple run of notes and a few echoing chords, “Cast Off” is soon overrun with roaring guitars. But it’s a new look for him—one that might take some getting used to for longtime listeners. “There was a review someone showed me at practice, where it said [the song] was ‘ironic Chop Sticks,’” Malkmus says with disgust. “There’s no irony in that! I was hoping for more of a Neil Young gravitas. Simple but direct. Not ‘Chop Sticks,’ which…

To begin, a few things about mulberry trees. The mulberry has stood as a symbol of patience and wisdom throughout the ages, a symbol of calculated restraint. It is, by all present appearances, a necessary icon for our divided times, a present political state in which basic human dignity is often forgotten. For Trevor Powers, the power of the mulberry was the results of pursuing a digital rabbit hole that culminated in thematic inspiration for his new album. For his first official release after setting Youth Lagoon aside (permanently, he says), Mulberry Violence is the timely statement he’s committed to make. “I go down a lot of rabbit holes, just like everyone, and I was reading about mulberry trees online,” says Powers. “I couldn’t even tell you what it was…

By the time the listener gets to “The Club,” the second track off Welsh singer/songwriter Gruff Rhys’ latest release, Babelsberg , they have already experienced a baroque country epic in the form of “Frontier Man” and now are hearing Rhys sing about being ripped apart by wolves and hammer head sharks “in the darkest alley” outside the club that he built. If they are the least bit confused, they should be assured that this is just par for the course for the frontman of Super Furry Animals and established solo artist and filmmaker. The latter position makes the cinematic scope of his lyrics and the title of the record all the more sensical. In 2014, Rhys was on tour and happened to see the sign for the…

Hand-picked by Andy Warhol for her striking, Germanic beauty, newly-conscripted vocalist Nico—born Christa Päffgen—became part of one of rock and roll’s most important records as if by accident. The European fashion model sang lead on only three tracks on The Velvet Underground & Nico , but as years passed and she came into her own as a serious artist, her modest role in that landmark rock moment proved to be a legacy she’d never escape. Acclaimed Danish actress Trine Dyrholm portrays the singer in the new biopic Nico, 1988, and was struck by a single quote from the late icon. Asked late in her life whether she had any regrets, Nico told her interviewer: “I don’t regret anything other than I was born a woman and not…

The music of Toronto band Bernice (whose current line-up is Robin Dann, Thom Gill, Dan Fortin, Felicity Williams, and Phil Melanson) is a melange of sounds and textures. Their sophomore album, Puff LP: In the air without a shape , is a playful recording that, moving in unexpected directions, incorporates pop, R&B, jazz, and electronic elements. But despite the busyness of Bernice’s palette, their music is not overwhelming. It’s minimalistic with a fixation on the minutia. “I’m curious to find sounds that I like and I’m not a great instrumentalist so it’s very much half-discovery and half-accidents,” says Dann, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, about Bernice’s sonic textures. She joins me on a cafe’s patio on a warm evening in Toronto alongside Williams and Gill. “I…

In a small cafe in roughly the center of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, serpentwithfeet’s fragrance arrives just a moment before he does. In the milliseconds before he appears sporting a beige bucket hat, off-gold tanktop, and baggy, mustard-yellow gym shorts with the acronym “GOAT” running down the left leg, an infusion of comforting, disarming aromas fills the room. It’s not a surprising arrival, given his well-documented fascination with body odor. This fixation is among the many idiosyncrasies that serpentwithfeet (whose birthname is Joshiah Wise) presents on his fantastic debut album soil , which is best described as the sound of standing atop a well and hearing that, at the bottom, a gospel-influenced singer with tremendous range and power is singing over beats ripped from Björk’s Medúlla…

Rickey Washington has told the story more times than he can count. He was a young college student, almost completely ignorant of the history and culture of West Africa, the first time he went to Ghana on a school-building mission in 1975. It was there that he heard a story that stuck with him: In West Africa there were two kings who each wanted their respective kingdoms to be seen as the spiritual and cultural center of the region, and so they entered a wager. They would each plant a seed from a kuma tree, and the tree that grew largest would determine which town deserved such a designation. The town of Kumasi—meaning “a place where people come together,” he says—was the winner. From then on, the people met under…

God’s Favorite Customer (SUB POP) Back when he was plain old J. Tillman, the man who reinvented himself as Father John Misty churned out records at quite a pace. The production line slowed since he dropped the earnest folk shtick and turned into cynical, satirical jokester Father John Misty in 2012, but output is ratcheting up. The gap between albums has narrowed from three years to two to one. So welcome to the stage God’s Favorite Customer. In case you’ve not listened for a while to the three other Father John Misty records, he starts with a handy Netflix-style recap. The first three tracks neatly capture previously ploughed furrows. “Hangout at the Gallows” is a more personally apocalyptic spin on 2017’s Pure Comedy, “Mr. Tillman” is the ever-so-knowing entertainer in…

Slow Air (WRECKING LIGHT) Still Corners, the duo of Greg Hughes and vocalist Tessa Murray, have been honing their craft since they dropped their debut album Creatures of An Hour in 2011. Three albums later this sound has evolved into a marvelous mix of sublime dreaminess and smart atmospheric pop-rock. It’s a sound that borrows heavily from the Cocteau Twins/Beach House aesthetic of airy guitars, hushed indie-rock beats, and ethereal vocals. Combined with blithe synth washes and crisp, vibrant beats, the songs have a multi-layered and textural edge to them without being overbearing. Opening track “In the Middle of the Night” along with “Welcome to Slow Air,” “Dreamlands,” and single “Black Lagoon” show off not only the pinnacle of the band’s newly developed sound but the duo’s ability to craft…

My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For this My Firsts we talk to Joey Dosik.  This summer the Los Angeles neo-soul singer released his debut full-length album, Inside Voice, via Secretly Canadian. The album is the follow-up to his debut EP, the basketball-themed Game Winner, which first came out in 2016, but was re-released with extra tracks this February by Secretly Canadian. Inside Voice features an array of collaborators, including Moses Sumney, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Mocky, Theo Katzman, and others. “Don’t Want It To Be Over” features Coco O. (of Quadron) and sounds like a classic 1960s Motown duet, although Dosik’s main…

Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth remember the moment they became pop songwriters. They were in Los Angeles with highly sought-after producer SOPHIE, playing one of their meticulously constructed demos. Built on a swirling chord sequence that repeated over and over, building anticipation for the vocals, the Norwich duo believed they were creating dramatic tension. SOPHIE made a simple suggestion: just go straight to the hook. “We were like, ‘Oh, no. We need the chords for the intro. People are supposed to get into it,’” Walton recalls. “And she was like, ‘It would be more effective if it just came in immediately.’ After a while, we let go and realized that not every song has to have a really long build up before the vocals come in.…

Brett Anderson has a piercing gaze that is very disarming, even if the Suede frontman doesn’t intentionally mean it to be, or maybe he does. It has been a quarter century since Anderson’s delicate features and unforgettable music made their indelible mark on the public’s consciousness. This afternoon Anderson has been taking in the rare sunshine in the garden of his country home in the Somerset region of England, reading a book. Now in his lounge, donned in a customary button-down shirt, Anderson has a few character-filled folds on his face, which add even more to his already imposing presence. “We were never going to be to be anyone’s fifth favorite band, were we?” Anderson asks rhetorically, acknowledging the spiritual commitment Suede fans willingly make in their allegiance to the…

If you’re looking for someone to congratulate (or blame), Alan Sparhawk points to Dave Fridmann. It was over a decade ago when Sparhawk and his wife Mimi Parker, the core members of Low, joined forces with Fridmann, the famed producer for The Flaming Lips, Sparklehorse, and Sleater-Kinney among others, for the first of two consecutive albums, 2005’s The Great Destroyer and 2007’s Drums and Guns . Those back-to-back studio sessions opened the lid, as Sparhawk describes, for a new chapter for the band, one that’s continuing to unfold over 10 years later on their latest release, Double Negative . “It was [while recording] Drums and Guns when it was clear that we were definitely stepping out of our normal element,…

If you were to make a word cloud representing Beach House vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Victoria Legrand describing the creative process she shares with multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally, the word “intuition” would be bold and about twice as big as any other word. Over the past 14 years, that intuition has served them well, resulting in a series of remarkably consistent albums that have evolved subtly while retaining the duo’s idiosyncratic aesthetic. When it works, that process resembles what Legrand likens to “children playing.” When it doesn’t, as happened at times while recording recent albums, it looks like two frustrated musicians sitting around in the studio for hours as they wait for the right microphones to be set up. For their seventh full-length album, 7 , they wanted to…

With her parents at work, Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan has the house to herself for the next several hours. Though she still lives at home, the 18-year-old’s time back in the Baltimore suburb of Ellicott City, Maryland is more or less a stopover between several days of promo in New York City earlier in the week and a flight in a few days’ time that will take her across the Atlantic for her first European tour. The full bore of her events calendar seems to already be taking a toll on Jordan, who despite buying flowers at the grocery store to celebrate her mother’s birthday, momentarily forgets what the day’s date is. She also admits she has no idea what cities she’ll be visiting once she gets overseas. “I don’t…

“Even he would make fun of himself for being a grumpy old guy!” Hariette Pilbeam, the 25-year-old Brisbane-based dream pop songwriter known as Hatchie, is recalling how surprisingly down to earth and welcomingly ordinary she found Robin Guthrie, whose band Cocteau Twins—perhaps the foremost act in the extensive dream pop canon—is a blatant influence. The two spoke on the phone a few times after she released her breakout 2017 debut single, “Try,” on which the meeting of Pilbeam’s gentle, soaring voice and her reverb-and-phaser-infused, diamond-clear guitars replicate the joy of Heaven or Las Vegas more excitingly, with a stronger pop bent, than many who have tried in the nearly three decades since. Pilbeam’s stunning talent for effortlessly blending the prime of dream pop with the unrelenting…

By November of 2016, Natalie Prass was prepared to take her next step. After her ornately baroque 2015 self-titled debut took her around the world and to the upper reaches of numerous album-of-the-year lists, she was ready to go back into the studio with a new set of intensely personal songs, rife with heartbreak and loss. Recording sessions were scheduled for December, and her team at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, Virginia—many of the same players who had contributed to her breakthrough—was in place. And then Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and seemingly everything changed overnight. Her sophomore release would have to wait. “After the election happened, I felt like I had no choice,” she recalls. “For me, I felt like my own issues and my own…

For Ever (XL) UK modern soul collective Jungle make suspiciously uncontroversial music. On their self-titled debut, their brand of moody mid-tempo funk was meticulously-crafted to soundtrack festival coverage and sports montages. The group appeared so calculated it was worth considering if they had anything to offer beyond their stylish image. The branding became especially suspicious when the group’s founding members were revealed to be two privately-educated white men. Notably, they were represented in early videos and promo shots by unnamed black dancers. For Ever does not dispel these concerns, but this second album does broaden Jungle’s sound towards a more distinctive style. While Jungle was musically homogeneous, exploring the limits of a specific style, this album finds room for Moby-esque walls of strings (“House in LA”), sharp summery dance groove (“Heavy, California”), and…

To conclude, we ask Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie (and also The Postal Service) some questions about endings and death. Death Cab for Cutie has been a pivotal act in bringing indie rock to the mainstream in the mid-to-late 2000s with seminal releases such as Transatlanticism , Plans , and Narrow Stairs . Gibbard’s pensive lyrics can be heard throughout in songs such as “A Lack of Color,” “Soul Meets Body,” “Cath...,” and “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” The band’s latest release, Thank You for Today , is the first without original guitarist and long-time producer, Chris Walla, and the first with Dave Depper and Zac Rae as official members. The album’s first single,…

To conclude, we ask Sam Genders of Tunng some questions about endings and death. Genders and Mike Lindsay formed the British folktronica band back in 2003, releasing their debut album, Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs in 2005. This year they have returned with Songs You Make At Night , their first album in five years and the first album since 2007’s Good Arrows to feature the full original lineup (including Ashley Bates, Phil Winter, Becky Jacobs, and Martin Smith), after Genders took a decade long break from the band. “We really wanted to do a Tunng record going back to the original line up,” Lindsay says in a press release. “There was a real magic in the early records that we…

LUMP’s conception barely involved any discussion: Laura Marling and Tunng’s frontman Mike Lindsay met at a Neil Young after party, and, after what Lindsay terms a “simple exchange of words,” LUMP was formed. The collaboration induced an unexpected creative freedom. “We didn’t really know each other very well before we started doing this,” Lindsay explains, “so it was a learning curve—I had no idea what it was going to be like.” A hypnotic mix of flutes, drones, synths, and guitars, LUMP’s self-titled debut shares characteristics with a surreal short film soundtrack at just 32 minutes long (with the credits read out by Marling to close the album in “LUMP is a Product”). Lindsay describes the writing process as dictated by a set of rules: “Each track had to be roughly…

As anyone who have ever experienced it knows, a Ryley Walker show is never just about the music. He also takes time to chat to the audience, mixing rambling stories in with profane jokes, and he doesn’t care what you think. “I guess some people might find it stupid but fuck ‘em,” the singer/songwriter/guitarist says. That’s typical of Walker who is both dedicated and individualist and loves his craft passionately to the point he gets annoyed when bands complain about how tough touring life and opening sets can be. “My dad is 60 and wakes up at five everyday to work on cars. I’d love to see the bands that complain lift a fucking couch up a flight of stairs.” As much as Walker lapses into this chatty and funny…

Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell, and Danny Coughlan, who records as Crybaby, were set up on a blind date of sorts, by a manager and publisher who thought the two musicians’ guitar pop might make for a fruitful collaboration. After receiving a song from Coughlan via a cassette in the mail, Campbell agreed to work with Coughlan and the pair sketched out a few songs, including what would become their eponymous debut album’s lead track, “Home and Dry.” But when Camera Obscura was put on hold after keyboardist Carey Lander passed away in 2015, Campbell decided to refocus on the collaboration, which she saw as a way to get out of the band bubble she had been in for the last two decades. “You know what’s happened over the past four…

On “Complications,” the second track from Interpol’s latest record, Marauder , frontman Paul Banks sings “dream of combinations/ all night long/round and round a rhythm escapes/I’m stuck without no answers.” It’s a line that sticks out as the most unintentional yet pitch-perfect epigraph for Interpol, a band that’s built a reputation for enticing listeners with saturnine vocals, impenetrable yet impactful lyrics, and the sort of ceaseless rhythms that made the quartet-cum-trio a staple of the New York post-punk revival over a decade ago. As one of the last bastions of that era still standing, Banks, guitarist Daniel Kessler, and drummer Sam Fogarino have an inescapable chemistry that’s as evident on Marauder as it was with their 2002-released debut album, Turn On the Bright Lights. “When we sit…

“We’re both anxious, weird people,” actress Elsie Fisher says, when asked how she is like Kayla Day, the idealistic and socially awkward 13-year-old vlogger she plays in Eighth Grade , the feature film debut from comedian Bo Burnham as writer and director. Burnham’s funny, empathetic film—which charts the highs, lows, and doldrums of Kayla’s final week of middle school— materialized from his desire to examine his struggle with anxiety. “I was getting tired of standup, and I wanted to write something that I enjoyed,” Burnham remembers. “I sat down and tried to talk a little bit about the Internet or what it felt like to be alive right now. And then this happened. I definitely didn’t sit down thinking that I want to make a YA, coming-of-age…

Fran Keaney, Joe White, and Tom Russo, the songwriting, singing, and guitaring part of Melbourne five-piece Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, are late. Not for rock and roll reasons though. They’ve been at the dry cleaners because, according to their tour manager, they don’t have any good jeans left for the show in Boston later that evening. When they do turn up, having left bassist Joe Russo and drummer Marcel Tussie with the clothes, they turn out to be down to earth and amiable. It helps they know each other very well. Keaney and White are cousins, Tussie lived with White, and the Russos are brothers. Perhaps that explains how they function with three focal points and no obvious sign of egos clashing. Tom Russo tells me “we’re conscious to keep…

I changed a Flasher lyric. No, really. When the Washington, D.C. trio first dropped their deterministic anthem “Skim Milk” back in March, the line “garment of vivid pink” sounded to me like “gone in a vivid pink . ” So I mentioned this mondegreen to the gang in our interview, and said I was disappointed that wasn’t actually correct. There’s a pause on the line, punctuated by drummer Emma Baker’s laugh. “It is now!” bassist Daniel Saperstein replies. That’s Flasher for you—even in their short lifespan as a democratic unit, the band of veteran scenesters have cultivated a space for flux. Back in 2016, their first EP bellowed cryptic messages about mutable, multiple selves in post-punk monochrome. Now, on Constant Image, their neon-lighted debut full-length, on Domino, those coded signals…

With a career that spans three decades and four Academy Award nominations, Ethan Hawke is among the premiere names in film. First making his mark as a young actor in movies such as Dead Poet’s Society , Reality Bites , and Before Sunrise , Hawke has remained one of the most consistent American actors, going on to win further acclaim for his roles in such works as Gattaca , Training Day , and Boyhood . Throughout his career the Austin-born actor has remained prolific—in 2018 alone he also stars in the films First Reformed , Stockholm , and Juliet ,…

European Heartbreak (HEAVENLY) Amber Arcades seemed to be on a trajectory to indie rock fame, building a reputation with a satisfying mix of dream pop and motor driven guitar pop over a couple of EPs and 2016’s LP Fading Lines. Less of a band and more of a solo project of Dutch singer/songwriter Annelotte de Graaf, Amber Arcades has now veered off target. The reverb-coated rock lullabies from last year’s Cannonball EP mixed just enough grit and grime and atmospheric guitar swirls to the dream pop melodies to make them appealing to both the indie and pop worlds. Unfortunately European Heartbreak has been cleansed of any grit and grime and instead been soiled by touches of folk and country. While moderately pleasing and not unenjoyable, the breezy songwriting uses gently…

Be the Cowboy (DEAD OCEANS) Mitski Miyawaki has a hard task: She has to somehow produce a follow up to her 2016 album Puberty 2, a master-class of indie rock with punk and balladeer edges that touched on identity, love, and rage. Mitski’s new album, Be the Cowboy, doesn’t quite reach those heights. But it almost feels unfair—if this wasn’t following up such a monumental album, it would a great achievement. Opener “Geyser” sets the tone nicely—instead of jagged, post-grunge guitars and anthemic build-ups, Be the Cowboy is, by-and-large, more tightly controlled with occasional crashes of emotions (with the exception of tracks like “A Pearl”). Mid-tempo songs like “Remember My Name” and piano-driven “Me and My Husband” aren’t bad by any means, but they feel plodding as they get to…

My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For this My Firsts we talk to Tomberlin (aka Sarah Beth Tomberlin). Tomberlin’s debut album, At Weddings, is out now via Saddle Creek. She was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but is now based in Louisville, Kentucky. Tomerlin grew up in a very religious household, the daughter of a Baptist pastor, and was homeschooled until the age of 16, after which she went to college at a private Christian school she only half-jokingly describes in a press release as a “cult.” At 17 she dropped out of school, returned home,…

Four-time Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke’s latest venture behind the camera is Blaze , a freewheeling biopic of cult country musician Blaze Foley, who died of a gunshot wound under unclear circumstances in 1989. Hawke directed, produced, and co-wrote the film, which stars Ben Dickey, Alia Shawkat, Charlie Sexton, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Zahn, and Sam Rockwell, and debuted to glowing reviews at 2018’s Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Dickey performs songs as Blaze Foley, while Sexton takes on the role of the legendary Townes Van Zandt; a soundtrack album featuring their cover songs has been released by Light in the Attic Records. Matthew Houck is the Alabama-born musician best known under his recording name, Phosphorescent. His music blends influences from country, rock, and Americana to accompany…