new wave

  • Was the world ever ready for Thomas Leer? Listening back to Thomas’s The Scale Of Ten one can hear all the potential there. It’s this theme of tweaking a recipe. Here it was to make his once abrasive, experimental blue-eyed soul into a chromed-out beast, outfitted in Fairlight CMI clothing, permeating with giant-sized hooks. In…

  • Faceless and nameless, but not without their charms. Library by Exotics is a fantastically twisted album that orbits between the worlds of power pop and electronic mutant funk. You’d think such a one-off would come out of nowhere, but there were seeds of who the Exotics were (and what they aimed to do) elsewhere.

  • How do you portray someone who is unrepresentable? French composer, artist, and songwriter Thierry Matioszek’s Matioszek provides a distorted view of the many moods of Thierry. I thoroughly enjoy it, perhaps, knowing that it’s nearly alien to the other releases Thierry had done before (and perhaps to the things he’d continue elsewhere or be more…

  • That intersection between organic and inorganic has been something I’ve been chewing on lately. What makes something one or the other? I’d argue that something as simple as the introduction of sampler instruments revolutionized the way we can make that argument immaterial.

  • An album that was born to be loved but remains surprisingly unfound, is the worst kind of album to introduce a band through. Belgian band Jo Lemaire + Flouze’s Pigmy World sounds unlike anything else in their discography but remains a stunning example of what happens when you reinvent your sound in a way few…

  • Leave it to me to create a post that’s not “evergreen” for a record that positively radiates with fun. Imagine Parliament set their mothership to Japan, and along the way picked up Gang Of Four, then decided that they really like techno-kayo music. Well, The Voice & Rhythm, led by the late, great vocalist and…

  • First, a huge thanks to Kyle for sharing this wonderful album with me. Too smooth for a Disco Tehran party he dj’ed, I can understand why he thought its sound might be appreciated elsewhere. From the first moment you put on Ziad Rahbani’s Houdou Nisbi (زياد الرحباني) you feel an instant pull that just floors…

  • Who knows what would have happened in France if New Yorker Valli Timbert hadn’t met filmmaker Philippe Bourgoin, at some Chelsea Hotel, in the late ‘70s? Philippe, not pictured on the cover of Chagrin D’Amour’s self-titled debut, was the French artiste who had fallen in love with rap early on in 1979. Then, via The…

  • “If you have taste, your long neck is an asset, your small stature is an asset, that crooked smile is an asset… Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.” – Diana Vreeland (ex-editor of Vogue/Bazaar magazine). It seems highly appropriate, and better stated, to use her words…

  •   The tale of Righeira appears weirder and weirder, the more I dig into it. Something about their self-titled debut is both so absolutely bananas and perfectly so. For the most part, we all know their hits/ear worms: “Vamos A La Playa” and “No Tengo Dinero”, but digging further one can be left more than…

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