Weekly Roundup - Unreviewed Releases: September 1-29, 2023

 

Calliope Music Weekly Roundup

Unreviewed Releases

September 1-29, 2023

Rated Albums

Yussef Dayes - Black Classical Music

7/10

Best Tracks: Black Classical Music (feat. Venna & Charlie Stacey) -- Rust (feat. Tom Misch) -- Turquoise Galaxy -- Pon di Plaza -- Chasing the Drum -- Marching Band (feat. Masego) -- Woman's Touch (feat. Jamilah Barry)

    Bubbling Fusion, Rooted and Savory at Every Level

Classic Jazz vibrations are freshened to tight compositions, soaked in a lathery reverberance. Clean drumming, echoing guitar, and piquant bass lines serenade over dreamy atmospheres and floating vocals. Although not every environment fields a sense of progress, Black Classical Music dominates with a first-class Jazz sound, bridging Funk and Spiritual Jazz into a sweet contemporary project.

Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

7/10

Best Tracks: Buffalo Replaced -- The Deal -- My Love Mine All Mine -- I'm Your Man -- I Love Me After You

A Satiny Fade Out for American Woe

Soft drums, warm acoustic guitar, velvety organ, and commodious piano prosper in matured Indie Folk developments. Smooth steel guitar and trickling banjo add to fuzzy atmospheres, establishing a dreary, yet nostalgic Americana sound.

Despite a few less interesting Chamber progressions throughout the 32 minute album, Mitski excels with a crestfallen confidence. Anecdotes of alcoholism, deals with the Devil, and misinterpreted love build a potent portfolio for essential escapism. As a result, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We gleams as a satin display of Folk, fading into the night it once came from.

Armand Hammer - We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

8/10

Best Tracks:  Woke Up and Asked Siri How I'm Gonna Die -- The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory -- When It Doesn't Start With A Kiss -- I Keep a Mirror In My Pocket -- The Gods Must Be Crazy -- Supermooned -- Switchboard -- The Key Is Under the Mat

Uncanny Hip-Hop Surrealism

A conglomerate of distorted drums, brooding bass, and echoing woodwind construct chilling Hip-Hop instrumentals. Elaborate electronics and hallucinatory samples singe the backdrop of each track, welding a disintegrating abstractness.

The conceptual nature of the record is multiplied through E L U C I D and billy wood's impressionistic lyricism, dense in an especially spectral lexicon. Religious iconography meets intrapersonal darkness, forming polysemantic verse submerged in the shadows of the two MC's eerie minds.

Although such lyrical and instrumental subtlety does, at times, overwhelm the pattern seeking brain, the 53 minute album delivers too intense of an sonic palette to dismiss altogether. This elusive, yet sinister environment coupled with supernatural verse make We Buy Diabetic Test Strips an unearthly encounter; a slow moving house of horrors, brimming with spidery poesy and melting concrete.