Essential Listening: This week’s best new music
Welcome back to Essential Listening, a place where we compile all the best new music of the week into the definitive tome of modern music: The Far Out Playlist.
A couple of solid new albums came out of the woodwork this week. Sports Team grew up a bit on their most recent LP, Gulp!, while Khruangbin teamed up with Vieux Farka Touré in order to pay tribute to Touré’s late father on Ali. We didn’t cover it in our album reviews this week, but I also quite enjoyed Death Cab For Cutie’s new album Asphalt Meadows as well.
But it was Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess who let the psychedelic sunshine in with his radiant and wonderfully overstuffed new double LP Typical Music. More is always more with Burgess, and with 22 songs running at feature lengths, there’s a lot more to love on Typical Music.
We had a couple of notable new singles floating around this week too. Still, only eight can make this list. Here is all the best new music from this week, compiled onto The Far Out Playlist.
Best new music, September 18th – 24th:
The Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Beguiled’
The next Smashing Pumpkins album will be a 33-song narrative opera, ATUM (pronounced like the season we’re about to get into). Subtitled A Rock Opera in Three Acts, ATUM will be the third release from the (mostly) reunited original lineup of the band featuring Jimmy Chamberlain and James Iha, plus longtime guitarist Jeff Shroeder.
‘Beguiled’ is a strange mix of nü-metal guitars and electronic handclaps that eventually spiral into a fairly standard Smashing Pumpkins track. I doubt anybody except diehard Pumpkins fanatics are going to be swayed one way or the other by ‘Beguiled’, but it’s still a solid track from a band that is firmly sticking to their chosen path. There’s something admirable in that, isn’t there?
Bush – ‘Heavy is the Ocean
British post-grunge rockers Bush have announced the second single from their upcoming ninth studio album, The Art of Survival, the slow-burning new track ‘Heavy is the Ocean’.
‘Heavy is the Ocean’ doesn’t really do much for me personally, but it’s a solid post-grunge track from a band that’s not exactly on too many people’s radars these days. It has more than a passing resemblance to another ’90s act and their most recent album – American sludge nerds Hum and their fantastic 2020 LP Inlet. ‘Heavy is the Ocean’ has that same brain-beating detuned riffage thing going on, even if it’s less sprawling and more generic than what Hum achieved.
Wild Pink – ‘See You Better Now (ft. J Mascis)
New York indie rockers Wild Pink are leaning into a few high-profile collaborations for their upcoming album, ILYSM. Last week, we got to hear the band play off fellow indie folk troubadour Julien Baker on the single ‘Hold My Hand’. Today, it’s time for another single and another team up with ‘See You Better Now’ featuring J Mascis.
For those of you living under numerous very heavy rocks, J Mascis is the legendary singer and guitar player for alternative rock icons Dinosaur Jr. Mascis’ tone and playing style is instantly identifiable, with the combination of his signature Fender Jazzmaster, high wattage amplifiers, and an arsenal of pedals producing something that sounds more like a flamethrower than a guitar. That’s what you want from J Mascis when you ask him to appear on a track, and that’s pretty much what he does on ‘See You Better Now’.
Spoon – ‘On The Radfio (Adrien Sherwood remix)
Following the release of Lucifer on the Sofa back in February, Spoon have unveiled a brand new album rework titled Lucifer on The Moon, which features remixes by the great Adrien Sherwood. The album isn’t slated for arrival until November 4th, but the band have just shared a new version of ‘On The Radio’ to whet our appetite.
Using Spoon’s indie background as his foundation, Sherwood explodes ‘On The Radio’, steeping the resulting fragments in tall reverbs, reverse delays and churning phasers. Although, according to Britt Daniel, “It wasn’t just a thing where you pick apart this and that and you stay on the grid and you add a delay.”
Alvvays – ‘Belinda Says’
In two weeks, Canadian indie pop heroes Alvvays will officially return with their third studio album, Blue Rev. It’ll be the band’s first since 2017’s Antisocialites, and it can’t come a moment too soon. A half-decade might as well be an eternity in the world of music, and in the time they were gone, just about every indie act has picked up on the unique blend of synthpop, indie rock, and electronic buzz that Alvvays helped pioneer at the start of the 2010s.
‘Belinda Says’ is a beautifully subdued track awash in fuzzy guitars and explosive drums. So far, the singles from Blue Rev has less jangle pop than any of the band’s previous releases. Instead, guitarist Alec O’Hanley seems more interested in creating textures, whether they be light soundscapes or thunderous bombs of feedback. Even his solo is more of a ripping classic rock guitar line than the nimble arpeggios he is usually known for.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers – ‘Eddie’
Funk-rock masters Red Hot Chili Peppers have released the second track off their upcoming album, the Rick Rubin-produced Return of the Dream Canteen. It comes in the form of a languid piece dedicated to the late guitar hero Eddie Van Halen entitled ‘Eddie’.
Similar to early cuts by the band such as ‘The Zephyr Song’, ‘Wet Sand’ and ‘Universally Speaking’, but coming with much crisper production and more atmosphere, courtesy of some Joy Division-esque bass playing from Flea, and one of guitarist John Frusciante’s best performances in an age. It’s a stylistic area that the band haven’t tapped into too much over their career, but it’s one that definitely works.
We Are Scientists – ‘Error Operation’
Indie legends We Are Scientists have released their first new music of the year, coming in the form of the expansive track ‘Operator Error’, which sees them considerably enlarge their sound.
The song leans heavily on electronics, with synths, textures and vocal effects creating a sound that is something of a blend of Before the Dawn Heals Us–era M83 and early cuts by The Killers, whilst throwing in a twist of the influential Talkie Walkie by Air for good measure.
Stevie Nicks – ‘For What It’s Worth’ (Buffalo Springfield cover)
There’s nothing better in music than when legends cover other legends. When Stevie Nicks was just an impressionable young hippie kicking around Northern California, the dream was to descend upon Los Angeles and become a part of the long tradition of great American artists. One of those artists she looked up to at that time was apparently Buffalo Springfield since Nicks had just released a cover of that band’s most famous work, ‘For What It’s Worth’.
There are actually two songs by Stevie Nicks titled ‘For What It’s Worth’ now: one is an original featured on Nicks’ 2011 album In Your Dreams, and now there’s the cover as well. I prefer Nicks’ original, but hey, now we get to hear what Nicks’ Stephen Stills impression sounds like, so I consider that a win.
