BeatRoute Magazine BC Edition - December 2019

N O 4 FONTAINES DC
Dogrel
Partisan Records
N O 5 HELADO NEGRO
This Is How You Smile
RVNG Intl.
N O 6 FKA TWIGS
MAGDALENE
Young Turkss
N O 7 SUMMER WALKER
Over It
LVRN/Interscope
N O 8 BIG THIEF
Two Hands
4AD
When BeatRoute caught up with
Dublin, Ireland’s Fontaines D.C. in
September they were adamant
about their quest to become one of
the biggest bands in the world.
While they may not have
achieved U2 or Rolling Stones status
yet, their debut album, Dogrel,
packs equal bark and bite, connecting
their socio political views
to the rest of the world through a
tightly wound collection of post
punk poetry.
The album was nominated for
the 2019 Mercury Prize, the UK’s
most coveted music award, and
pushed the band into working even
harder towards their goal of greatness,
spending most of the year on
the road. At one point, they even
had to cancel a significant string of
tour dates due to exhaustion.
Fontaines possess a unique
shuffle and swagger to their
delivery and when frontman
Grian Chatten cycles through his
rolodex of influences that include
Ian Curtis, Gang of Four and Wire
crossed with their post punk
contemporaries like Girl Band and
Shame, there’s something special
that happens and you can actually
feel a beating heart at the core of
each track.
From the the anthemic “Boys In
The Better Land,” to the sensitive
and hypnotic “Television Screens,”
and the barroom ballad closer,
“Dublin City Sky,” the young quintet
have created a powerful bridge
from their discontent in Dublin to
music fans all over and they’ve got
everyone dancing in the process.
Glenn Alderson
Roberto Carlos Lange pulls from
his boundlessly creative arsenal
and presents us with This Is How
You Smile, a mingle of lo-fi audio experimentals,
swervy electro-synth,
and the hypnotics of his own sweet
voice, signed off under the moniker
Helado Negro.
There are harsh truths in Lange’s
sixth album; born to Ecuadorian
parents and living in the socio-political
turmoil of present-day America,
the stories he weaves through Smile
bear witness to the everyday tragedies
and psychological anguish
around immigration and displacement.
But this musical masterpiece—and
that it is—utilizes hope
as an axis from which to gently, daringly
subvert such matters. Visibility.
Identity. Self-love. Kindness.
The sensorial journey begins with
the tender “Please Won’t Please;”
Lange’s sleepy voice ruminates
on brown skin, bittersweet. He
cocoons you in warm guitar strums
and reminds you that it’s okay.
Lange’s love of experimenting with
sound—he records constantly with
his iPhone and infuses his music
with everyday sounds—comes to
life in collages such as the closing
track “My Name Is for My Friends,”
which incorporates recordings of an
Abolish ICE march and kids playing
in his friend’s living room.
Smile is bilingual, like Lange. The
ambling “País Nublado,” features
both English and Spanish, with
dreamy backup vocals providing
relief to fears of a politically “cloudy
country.” The melodic, recursive
“Running” urges slowing down for
its simple beauty.
An ambient, spectral quality reverberates
throughout Smile. It is a
lifeboat in a stormy sea, a synth-induced
meditation for, as Lange
croons in “Seen My Aura,” “sitting
with the sky.” Dayna Mahannah
Her first full length album since LP1
(2014) and the first release of any
kind since the incredible M3LL155X
EP (2015), FKA twigs’ MAGDA-
LENE was a long-awaited release
that bears the weight of our society
in these uncertain times.
By placing herself in direct lineage
with a complex Biblical figure,
twigs demonstrates the pressure,
erasure and demonization of
women throughout history. And
although a somewhat typical figure
for an avant-garde artist, the long
misrepresented Magdalene acts as
a vessel to speak on current truths:
the difficulty of keeping ourselves
afloat amid society’s seething
pressures.
Continuing on the experimental
R&B wave she first charted in 2014,
MAGDALENE is a perfectly crafted
story arc. Opening with “Thousand
Eyes,” twigs’ vocals cascade like a
holy choir of archangels; “Sad Day”
builds omnisciently, mimicking the
rise and fall of a battle. The album
peaks with “Fallen Alien” and slowly
crumbles into a quiet demise, with
“Daybed” acting as the comedown.
The final track “Cellophane” leaves
listeners hanging in the balance
with haunting vocals and sharp
vulnerability.
MAGDALENE is FKA twigs at her
best, delivering a cinematic narrative
of love, loneliness, pain, illness,
and recovery, with an underlying
sense of hope.
Jessica D’Angelo
Playful yet introspective, the
opening lyrics of “Over It” sets the
tone for the debut album of the
same name that has taken Atlanta
native Summer Walker from exotic
dancing and cleaning houses to the
top of the Billboard charts in less
than two years.
While Over It has all the accolades
to prove just how great of an
album it is—including the biggest
debut album for an R&B female
artist in over 10 years, and the
largest-ever streaming week for a
female R&B artist—this is an album
that represents one of the rare
moments that the mainstream and
“the culture” are in agreeance at
the exact same time.
While the “fell in love with a
stripper” trope in rap and R&B is
nothing new, Walker is perhaps the
first artist to give the other side
of the story. Aided by productions
from lauded trap producer and
current boyfriend, London on Da
Track, Over It is a masterful sonic
mix of 90s R&B nostalgia with
Southern strip club vibes—the perfect
canvas for Walker’s laments on
love, heartbreak and womanhood.
And in case you were wondering,
the two met at a strip club Walker
was working at over four years ago,
naturally.
Summer Walker has hinted that
she might retire from music soon
as a result of her social anxiety
and painful shyness, but here’s to
hoping that she’s not Over It and
this is just the beginning.
Josephine Cruz
Big Thief stole the spotlight in
2019 by releasing two albums that,
rooted by the band’s philosophical
inquiries, branch off into distinct
sonic realms.
Where U.F.O.F. (Unidentified
Flying Object Friend) leans on lush
production and eerie samples to
invoke the cosmos, Two Hands
relies on few takes and minimal
overdubs to strip their sound to its
barest bones. The two projects,
nicknamed “The Celestial Twin”
and “The Earth Twin” span the
reaches of outer space and upturn
every rock on Earth to wonder
about human connectedness and
consciousness in complicated
times.
Two Hands is more than its music.
“Most of what we are as a band
isn’t music, it’s our relationships
and our friendships,” guitarist and
lead singer Adrianne Lenker told
BeatRoute. “The music is an expression
of that—so the music only
becomes what it does because of
our relationships with each other.”
The album embodies the
quartet’s ethos of raw vulnerability
and radical coexistence. Lenker’s
vocals quiver with intimacy and
the live takes prioritize passion
over perfection. On emotional
centrepiece “Not,” Lenker has said
they played as if their hair was
on fire. Invoking the desert clime
of the El Paso studio where they
recorded, the whole album feels
burnt to a crisp.
Big Thief masterfully conflate the
personal with the political without
ever pandering or pontificating.
Lenker’s lyrics blur the internal and
external, peppering her stories with
enough personal details as to invite
listeners into a sense of shared
experience. It’s an album to be lost
and found in.
Maggie McPhee