Music for 2016 | Part II

We already reached half of the year and my best of list is still lacking. But here are a few nice recommendations released in the last couple of months.

The Hope Six Demolition Project

by PJ Harvey
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"Harvey went out into the world and here reports her encounters in abrasively straightforward fashion. Some might deem the lack of personal perspective an oversight. Yet in keeping herself at one remove, Harvey lets the inner truth of her experiences shine more brightly. To spend time with this record is to peer over her shoulder as she casts aside the familiar and embraces the strange and unknowable. It is, by those standards, an exhilarating affair – a political album whose most daring gesture is its refusal to evangelise or furnish easy comforts." — Ed Power, The Quietus
Anspieltipp: ▶︎ The Wheel

Hopelessness

by Anohni
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"Protest songs tend unwittingly to have a kernel of optimism that blunts their critique, regardless of how shrill, eloquent, or concerned their singers are: As bad as things may be, protest is directed at some exterior target, therefore preserving one’s own moral clarity as a virtue and source of redemption. Not so with Hopelessness. The nature of the evil that haunts the album (and, arguably, the planet) is universal, shared, and dyed in our wool as humans rather than a flaw in any particular individual. If these days are apocalyptic, it would be false solace to believe we’ll face judgment one by one." — Antichristian, Tiny Mix Tapes
Anspieltipp: ▶︎ Drone Bomb Me (Yes, it's Naomi Campbell.)

Will

by Julianna Barwick
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"The voice may be the original instrument, as the groundbreaking experimental singer Joan La Barbara put it, but in Julianna Barwick's music, the voice itself isn't necessarily a point of origin. Layering and looping her often-wordless singing into hypnotic and otherworldly configurations, she enters her songs as though slipping into a stream. The music, she seems to say, precedes us, and it will outlast us; we don't so much carry songs as allow ourselves to be carried along by them, swept up in their current for a little while." — Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork
Anspieltipp: ▶︎ Nebula

See also: Part I