Duquette Johnston "Social Animals"
For more than twenty years, Duquette Johnston has been amongst the vanguard of Alabama music. From the founding of the seminal indie-rock band Verbena, his work in Cutgrass and the Gum Creek Killers, to his acclaimed solo releases “Etowah” and “Rabbit Runs a Destiny”, Johnston has consistently pushed the boundaries of what Southern American music can sound– and feel– like. On his latest, The Social Animals, Johnston partnered with producer John Agnello and an all-star cast of players including Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley to create his boldest and most powerful music to date.
In a career that’s taken him from stages with Pavement, Foo Fighters and The Strokes, to the Etowah County Correctional Facility, and then into the world of fashion with his Birmingham-based company Club Duquette, Duquette Johnston has gone to the edge and survived. Throughout that, he’s won acclaim from NPR’s World Cafe, Paste Magazine and Rolling Stone.
On The Social Animals, he opens the door into that experience with eleven songs that shake off the typical Southern Americana sound and present a lush, loud, and eloquent meditation on the human experience.
Carson Mchone "Still Life (Merge)"
“Still Life, Carson McHone’s third album and first release with Merge Records, quivers like a tightrope, with songs about existing within the tension of the in between and surviving beyond the breaking point. These are stories of sabotage, confusion, and surrender. The album is a testament to the effort of reaching, sometimes flailing, for understanding and for balance. Still Life invites us to gasp at our own reflection and acknowledge the unsettling beauty in this breath.
McHone wrote the songs of Still Life in quiet moments between tours in her hometown of Austin, then recorded in Ontario with Canadian musician and producer Daniel Romano. Together in a home studio McHone and Romano cut almost the entire record themselves, calling on two friends, the versatile Mark Lalama on accordion, piano, and organ, and David Nardi with some savvy saxophone, to round it out. The phrasing and tones recall John Cale, The Kinks, Richard and Linda Thompson—like-minded artists of the late ’60s and early ’70s, another era of transition and innovation.”
Basia Bulat "The Garden"
Introducing The Garden: a Strings album and a Retrospective from a room in Montreal with the windows open, and the wind moving, and the leaves changing, and a spring-coloured secret on the tip of Basia Bulat’s tongue.
The Garden gathers fourteen string arrangements by three different arrangers (Owen Pallett, Paul Frith, and Zou Zou Robidoux), revisiting material from all five of Bulat’s studio albums. There’s Pallett’s interpretation of 2010’s Heart of my Own, calling back to the Béla Bartók compositions that marked Bulat’s high-school career as an upright bassist. There’s Frith’s Infamous, which turns 2016’s prickly kiss-off into something open-facing and generous. And there’s Robidoux’s reimagining of Are You In Love? — released just last year — which here becomes a whirling ballroom dance, full of discovery.
The Body & OAA "Enemy Of Love (Thrill Jockey)"
“In the land of split LP’s, The Body rules with a heavy hand. In the past five years alone, they’ve worked with some of the harshest soundmakers this side of the Pacific, with Full of Hell, Thou, and Uniform ranking among their most deranged creative partners. Today, they announced their next project, Enemy of Love, a joint album with OAA — Portland producer AJ Wilson, not the British Metalcore outfit Oceans Ate Alaska — out February 18 on Thrill Jockey.
With the announcement comes “Barren of Joy,” the record’s relentlessly sludgy lead single. It’s just under five minutes long, but through some dark magic or rip in the spacetime continuum, its finish leaves the listener feeling years older than they were when they pressed play. If the rest of the album follows suit, the world could end up with a confused generation of millennial metalheads who find themselves in their mid 60s after giving it a full spin.”
– Raphael Helfand, The Fader