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We have updated versions of the app for both iOS and Android, resolving issues around favouriting, text clipping and updating Android to the latest UI changes — see our previous substack post for a recap of what these are. Click the links below to update.
Lewis Todd on the fifth album from Essex auteurs These New Puritans.
“Since 2013’s Field of Reeds, their work has shifted markedly away from the beat-making side of their interests, and instead towards a highly structured mode of composition more associated with chamber or film rather than rock or sample-based music. In this context, Crooked Wing represents their most ambitious and highly mythologised piece of work yet, and one in which the labours of the Essex autodidacts are realised in their most accomplished form.”
Alice Boyd on FKA Twigs session Cellist turned solo artist Lucinda Chua.
“Rather than offering answers, YIAN returns again and again to questions: “who do I run from, who do I run toward?”, “who do I turn to when I’m not part of you?” - allowing them to remain unanswered. There is something deeply human in this repetition and in the refusal to arrive at clarity or closure. Chua’s music acknowledges uncertainty without attempting to resolve it, allowing in-betweenness to remain as part of an ongoing process of growth and change.”
An interview with the Manchester three-piece. A Cantilever exclusive (for two more days…)
“When I first joined the band I remember listening to the demo of "Cable Ties" and walking through Manchester. It felt like walking through a dark city and seeing a warm window in a skyscraper. A warm window in the coldness of the city.”
Henry Young on the latest album from the acclaimed folk-adjacent singer-songwriter.
“The verse lyric “My heart longs to bring you news of something else” alludes to American modernist poet William Carlos Williams and his ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.` It’s a profound reference. The same poem famously contains the line: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” It is also apposite. Williams was famous for the maxim: “No ideas but in things” – a pursuit to ground abstract concepts in concrete objects, which is consistent with Leonard’s desire to make “songs like stones.”
Toye Oladinni runs through MF DOOM’s incredibly prolific early 2000s period.
“Take Me To Your Leader has the five minute "Monster Zero", a mash up of dialogue from eight separate movies and TV shows, all over a woozy, cinematic Idris Muhammed loop, and cartoonishly heavy drums. (“So don't fuck around, the X ain't glued tight / Oh, yeah, I'll tell ya somethin', your drums ain't cued right,” DOOM rapped once as Zev Love X). Everything comes together to lay the album’s concept bare: a three-headed monster - Geedorah, a pastiche of Japanese kaiju Gidorah - arrives from space, first to assess the world, and then to conquer it. People flee; there are sightings on Lagos Island. Like the album as a whole, the track is polyvocal, playful, political, apocalyptic, a product of a Hip-Hop / Japan crossover so seminal that the artform, in the early 80s, reached Tokyo before the West Coast.”
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