Posts Tagged ‘Stella Mozgawa’

HARKIN – ” Harkin “

Posted: April 25, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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After years in the background, songwriter Harkin surely earned her place in the limelight after being a touring member for such profound artists like Sleater-Kinney, Wild Beasts, Flock of Dimes, Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett. Harkin has been around for a few years now and is a well respected figure in the scene so this self-titled debut album was overdue on many levels one might say. Featuring contributions from Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa and Wye Oak & Bon Iver member Jenn Wasner the album was completed over 16 days dotted between the artist’s gruelling tour schedule so there is a sense of urgency in it that adds additional drive to the record. And that’s also how this albums feels like – a smooth and playful independent rock quickie but without lacking of profound depth. A wild spirit can’t be tamed anyway and Harkin delivers a fitting record for that purpose. Her debut was mostly written on the road, in a cottage in the Peak District (he UK’s oldest national park) and in Upstate New York and there’s a restlessness in the sound of these ten tracks really captured that vibe.

Mist Of Glass and Nothing The Night Can’t Change start the record with uplifting energy while the dazzling Decade shows a sensual longing that changes the tempo a bit before Up To Speed does exactly what the title implies. “Many of these songs grew from the tension between opposites,” Harkin explains the notion of the album, furthermore specifying these tensions by adding they are “between the wilderness and the city, between self-examination and communal ecstatic, night and day, love and shame.” This record is a testament of this fast-paced pre-Corona times it was recorded in. However, within its speed Harkin also seeks for calmness, resulting in a hypnotic mantra Dial It In and more hazy moments like New France.

The songs aren’t perfect and they surely aren’t revolutionary but that’s their biggest plus. In the closing track Charm And Tedium it’s only Harkin‘s vocals and her electric guitar that you hear, ending this record with the same raw approach it started with. This is the pure testament of a skilled songwriter and might be one of the most experienced debuts you can enjoy right now.

Hand Mirror Records 
Released on: 2020-02-10

KIM GORDON – ” No Home Record “

Posted: October 13, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Kim Gordon Delivers Ferocious Solo Debut <i>No Home Record</i>

Kim Gordon doesn’t put much stock in the superlatives that have piled up around her over the years: pioneer, visionary, icon, legend, beacon. “Being referred to as an ‘icon,’ blah blah blah,” she said recently in the New York Times. “What does that even mean?”

Fair enough, but you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s earned it. As a visual artist, co-founder of Sonic Youth, fashion designer and occasional actor, Gordon has been a magnetic, and inscrutable, focal point of indie cool for nearly 40 years. In all that time, her musical pursuits have come in group projects: 15 studio albums with Sonic Youth, three each as part of Free Kitten and Body/Head and one with Glitterbust, along with various EPs and singles scattered among them. Now, at the age of 66, Gordon steps out with No Home Record, a ferocious solo debut. It’s jagged, chaotic and mesmerizing in a way that pulls you inevitably into the thick of it, as if the songs were exerting their own inescapable gravity.

Though Gordon delivers these nine songs with supreme, unruffled confidence, there’s an unsettledness to them that reflects the sense of impermanence she has felt since moving back to Los Angeles, that most transient of cities. On “Air BnB,” the feeling manifests in the lyrics of her sardonic ode to the gig economy. She lists off amenities you might find in the web copy—something about towels, a flat-screen TV, a daybed—over gnashing guitars that sputter and grind before dropping into gear on the refrain as she wails, “Air BnB, gonna set me free.”

There’s a form of abnegation happening on “Murdered Out,” which Gordon first released as a single in 2016. She noticed that the low-rider car-culture trend of matte-black paint jobs was becoming more widely fashionable. The embrace of light-absorbing finishes struck her as “the supreme inward look, a culture collapsing in on itself, the outsider as an unwilling participant as the ‘it’ look,” she explained. Gordon pursues that idea in the lyrics, her voice alternating between breathless and abrupt on the verse and formidable full-throated keening on the refrain, accompanied by a massive, relentless beat from Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa and snakey blasts of guitar that writhe and churn. The overall effect is at once imposing and enthralling.

Gordon tinkers throughout with rhythms, intoning short, incisive lyrical phrases over a hypnotic mechanical beat on “Cookie Butter,” and letting the electro-clash drums on “Sketch Artist” drop out here and there for free-form interludes. Toward the end of No Home Record, she skips the beat altogether on “Earthquake,” singing in dusky tones over drifting guitars, crescendos of cymbal wash and some crumbly electronic noise in the background. It’s the most straightforward song on the album, but instead of ending there, Gordon takes one more foray into mercurial weirdness on album closer “Get Yr Life Back.” Her voice is often little more than a disquieting whisper surrounded by an eerie clanking rhythm and thickets of guitar feedback and brittle noise that blanket the song like some sinister fog.