Album reviews: Shabazz Palaces – Quazarz: Born On A Gangster Star / Quazarz Vs The Jealous Machines, John Murry – A Short History Of Decay

Plus Chris Merrick Hughes – Eirenic Life, The Beach Boys – 1967: Sunshine Tomorrow, Karl Hyde & Matthew Herbert – Fatherland, Max Richter/Various Artists – Behind The Counter With Max Richter, Mr Jukes – God First

Shabazz Palaces blast off with a new pair of albums

Shabazz Palaces, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star

★★★★☆

Shabazz Palaces, Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines

★★★★☆

Download: Since CAYA; That’s How City Life Goes; Moon Whip Quaz; Welcome To Quazarz; Effeminence; 30 Clip Extension

The UFO and space-race obsessions of the latter half of the 20th century heralded an interesting new phase in black American music, epitomised by the likes of Sun Ra and George Clinton. For the first wave of black space-jazzers the cosmos was a place of untrammelled opportunity, where they could follow their imaginations to truly create the “music of the spheres” – and, no little matter, in a place (thus far) free of prejudice and hate. For Clinton’s sprawling Mothership, the imperatives of musical imagination and social equality were further inflated by huge doses of acid-fuelled absurdity and fun, an influence reflected, a few decades down the line, in hip-hop’s daisy-age generation, by the likes of De La Soul, Dream Warriors, PM Dawn and Digable Planets, who rejected rap’s ghettocentric attitude in favour of imaginative outreach.

Digable Planets’ prime mover Butterfly has changed his identity, though his outlook continues to run against prevailing hip-hop mores. He’s now Palaceer Lazaro, wordsmith and co-producer alongside Tendai Maraire in Shabazz Palaces, Seattle’s groundbreaking rap duo. Previous albums Black Up and Lese Majesty staked out open-ended territory, upon which this new pair of albums build the group’s most ambitious work yet, a conceptual affair in which the space visitor Quazarz is sent to “Amurderca” as an observer and musical emissary. It’s a theme which allows Lazaro to cast an amused, jaundiced, occasionally appalled eye over his country’s condition, whether it’s the urban-noir-funk depiction of “That’s How City Life Goes”, or simply squeezing “law enforcement” to rhyme with “four horsemen”.

As if heard through alien ears, the arrangements have a weird, woozy character, with the abstract beats and trickly, liquid synth parts punctuated by unusual instruments like the bass clarinet on the opening “Since CAYA”, which finds Quazarz lost in the streets, unable to recall his last tweet. It’s not hip-hop’s usual terrain: in “That’s How City Life Goes”, an electric harpsichord sounds as if a spider is tiptoeing across the keys, while “Moon Whip Quaz” resembles a drunken memory of Kraftwerk’s “The Model”. Elsewhere, the creepy organ instrumental “Deesse Du Sang” recalls The Residents, in the way that the same disconcerting blend of mystery, menace and hope seem to coexist in the same space and time.

On the second of the two albums, Quazarz’s focus turns to humanity’s increasingly obsessional relationship with devices, and the way that the “soft cyber-caress” of screens and separation leads to an ever-extending assassination of character: “we kill time, we kill cameras”. Along the way, Lazaro finds space to cast a raised eyebrow at black America in tracks like “Love In The Time Of Kanye” – tantalisingly poised between tribute and pisstake – and the more ambitious “30 Clip Extension”, which contemplates hip-hop through jump-cuts from 1968 through to 2064, characterising rappers (if I read it correctly) as “ghost riders… altered by an ego… living in the people”.

Elsewhere, “The 55 Quintessence” castigates “fascist terrorists with hashtags”, while a modicum of counterbalance is provided by the romantic throbs of “Julian’s Dream” and especially “Effeminence”, a hypnotically shuffling, sensuous piece which demonstrates that Quazarz is just as vulnerable to the lure of the ladies.

John Murry, A Short History Of Decay

★★☆☆☆

Download: Silver Or Lead; Under A Darker Moon

John Murry is not the world’s luckiest man. Since his critically-acclaimed 2012 album The Graceless Age, his wife left him, his best friend died, and his record company dropped him – a triple whammy that helps explain the gloom hanging over A Short History Of Decay, but doesn’t make it any more palatable. This is a glum traipse through life’s bum deals, its tone set by the ennui of “Silver Or Lead”, with Murry’s torpid murmur matched by the sparseness of the backing – a few reverbed guitar notes, an occasional swish of cymbal – as if the parts can barely be bothered to accrete into a tune. “I’ll play the deadweight, force every curtain to fall,” muses Murry, but there’s little reason for it to rise in the first place on the self-lacerating victims stewing in resentful resignation in songs like “Wrong Man” and “Defacing Sunday Bulletins”. “All I do is fix whatever I broke the day before,” he explains, but ultimately these fixings lack the transformative quality to transmute depression into art.

The Beach Boys, 1967: Sunshine Tomorrow

★★★☆☆

Download: Wild Honey; Darlin’; Here Comes The Night; Time To Get Alone

1967 found The Beach Boys in backwash mode after the pop tsunamis of Pet Sounds and the aborted Smile project. Retiring to Brian Wilson’s home studio, they recorded as a band again, rather than using a session crew. Effectively, just as pop reached its psychedelic pinnacle of complexity, one of its most adventurous exponents retreated into stripped-down simplicity – but unlike their earlier tyro works, the simplicity is rarely matched by killer tunes on this album, which yokes together the first-ever stereo mix of Wild Honey with a tranche of outtakes and fragments, and an extra CD of efficient but uninspiring live performances. Of course, there are some great moments: it’s fun to hear Carl trying out his new “soul” delivery on a cover of “I Was Made To Love Her”, and a gorgeous early take of “Time To Get Alone” bests the one later released on 20/20. But the “Session Highlights” compilations of song fragments are woeful, just spatchcocked works-in-progress.

Chris Merrick Hughes, Eirenic Life

★★★★☆

Download: Prelude/NSV; Dily’s Dream; The Girl With The Jesus Towel; Safe Warm Sun

My dictionary defines “eirenic” as “peaceable” – which isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when considering producer Chris Hughes, who made his mark crystallising the diversely big, bold sounds that hoisted Adam Ant and Tears For Fears to globe-girdling status. By contrast, the quiet piano pieces of Eirenic Life are intriguingly low-key. Lengthy opener “Prelude/NSV” is typical: with a background synth pad warbling almost inaudibly behind a series of enigmatic piano progressions, it situates Hughes alongside quiet contemporary classicists like Max Richter and Olafur Arnalds; though his music eschews the fashionable easy-listening quality and minimalist logic employed by many operating in Ludovico Einaudi’s considerable wake. Rather than offering comfort and stability, it keeps one slightly perturbed, though not aggressively so. Elsewhere, “Dily’s Dream” is delightfully light and spirited, and “The Girl With The Jesus Towel” features some lovely fluttering repetitions, before “Safe Warm Sun” draws things to a glowing close – though even this “calm ending” is not without subtle hints of quiet anxiety.

Karl Hyde & Matthew Herbert, Fatherland

★★★★☆

Download: We All Hurt; I Get Nightmares; Melting Man; Not A Word

Created from interviews about fatherhood recorded in Lancashire in 2015, the play Fatherland is currently showing at this month’s Manchester International Festival (until 22 July), accompanied by Karl Hyde & Matthew Herbert’s unusually electro/industrial, almost musique concrete score. Here, the music provides somberly gripping backdrops to vivid biographical tales mined from the same source material, which bears Hyde’s signature style of overheard conversations. In many cases, long-held shame and resentment is discharged via hints at abuse and alcoholism, and acknowledgements that “love” is not a word used within the family context. In one particularly compelling piece recalling slum life during wartime, a character admits: “I used to sit outside at night and watch Birmingham burn”; another, “Melting Man”, features a grisly, detailed account of undertakers dealing with the dissolving remains of a father discovered six weeks after his death. At the opposite extreme, the euphoria of parenthood is effusively conveyed in several tracks, though the overall mood created by the heavily reverbed vocals, drones and pulses remains pregnant with potential distress.

Max Richter/Various Artists, Behind The Counter With Max Richter

★★★★★

Download: The Unanswered Question; Qui Habitat; Rockets Fall On Rocket Falls; Deep Six Textbook; Dixit Dominus; Dream 3

Most mix albums are risky prospects, either ploughing a single furrow endlessly, as in most hip-hop ones, or fulfilling some ulterior motive on the part of the curator. Not in this case: Max Richter’s only motive here is beauty, drawn from all corners of his musical interests, which are many and varied. The result is a journey that takes one from Renaissance choral polyphony to the inventive precocity of teen duo Let’s Eat Grandma, via Bach and Handel, minimalism, post-rock and electronica, with nary a misstep in sound, selection or sequence – as asserted by the first disc’s seamless shifts from the misty strings, discordant horns and agitated woodwind of Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”, through a stately, elegant Bach piano piece by Alfred Brendel, to an acappella work sculpted from breaths, low moans and pulses by Roomful Of Teeth. Entire continents, modes, and musical attitudes traversed within a few minutes, without a hint of incongruity or discontinuity: a rare feat, and a rare treat.

Mr. Jukes, God First

★★★☆☆

Download: Typhoon; Grant Green; Leap Of Faith

For his debut as Mr Jukes, former Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman uses deftly-applied jazz samples, restoring his youthful interest in that genre after years in the indie salt-mines. “Grant Green”, for instance, employs a lift from that guitarist as the root for a fiery organ/horns/percussion groove, over which veteran soulster Charles Bradley adds his trademark searing vocal spears; and the infectious loping jazz-funk groove of “Angels/Your Love” is built around brash horns from a track by Argentinean Jorge Lopez Ruiz. As well as Bradley, Lalah Hathaway and Lianne La Havas are among other guest vocalists, the most potent of which are falsetto reggae crooner Horace Andy and daisy-age rappers De La Soul, “hoping for the blessings that come after bliss” over the urgent, pulsing groove of “Leap Of Faith”. By contrast, the opener “Typhoon” offers the delightful diversion of a post-modern sea-shanty, with Steadman singing “By the foam, by the spray, I shall meet the coming day”, over descending waves of vibes and strings.