A second 2024 review package, featuring fresh and archival wares from Rupert Lally, Dean McPhee, Aircooled, Essential Logic and more

Forwards then into February, arguably the hardest month of the year for many. Thankfully though, there are plenty of audio distractions worth picking over to help get us through it, including the below.

Arriving as a sort-of-sequel to 2022’s wonderful Wanderweg, via the same label route, comes Rupert Lally’s Sculptures on the mercurial Modern Aviation. Whilst there have been plenty of Lally wares in various forms elsewhere in the interim, this feels like a creator and curator recoupling with a distinctive edge.

Extending upon the walking travelogues of Wanderweg, to include extra inspiration from a series of forest-positioned sculptures in Swiss locales between Bremgarten and Wohlen (near where Lally calls home), Sculptures is a sleeker and more shadowy suite of instrumental set-pieces. Although the album does miss the warmer lower-tech charms of its predecessor, it nevertheless commands similar attention, albeit from some recalibrated directions.

With guitars crucially again more to the fore, amidst otherwise electronically-stitched assemblages, Lally delivers a series of sophisticated yet succinct essays. This means taking through us sublime Durutti Column-goes-dub grooves (“Spiritdance”), ethereal ruminative Robin Guthrie-like self-layering (“The Red Lady”), the gloomier ends of Slowdive-shaped shoegaze (“The Talisman”), pulsing astral-funk (“Three Angels” and “Star Frame”), mournful Piano Magicisms (“Big Shoes to Fill”) and languorous if bleak kosmische (“Hexenmusik”), along the way.

Even though ultimately, Sculptures does not surpass the Rupert Lally-meets-Modern Aviation career-high of Wanderweg, it is still a strongly compelling companion collection.

Similarly fixated by one-man journeying – but with eyes on the interstellar sky at night – is solo electric guitar explorer Dean McPhee, who returns with Astral Gold (Bass Ritual). Although a record collated from several tracks rescued from a rare lathe-cut seven-inch single and two multi-artist compilations, along with a pair of previously unshared compositions, this is still a cohesive gathering that deepens its author’s aural palette – with a more textured and tiered approach applied to the core six-string roving.

Consequently, the opening “Cosmos” skulks along like a vocal and drum-free psych-raga demo from Bardo Pond; the looser “Ether” hangs lighter in the air whilst displaying a desolate underbelly; the EBow-smeared evocations of “Neptune” take on an almost avant-classical resonance; the sparse twangy “Lunar Fire” invokes thoughts of a British folklore-imbibing Brokeback; the haunting and at times squally sounds of “The Second Message” envision an outtake from Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting recorded in a gothic church; and the closing ten-minute “The Sediment of Creation” echoes the most strung out parts of Plankton Wat’s Spirits LP.

As with preceding Dean McPhee platters, Astral Gold is not a straightforward pick up and play conception, yet its luna-lit sonic landscapes are ripe for getting thoroughly lost and then found in.

From Astral Gold to Eat the Gold, the second album from Aircooled, on Music’s Not Dead. Now a fully road-tested four-piece, still led by the chameleonic Oliver Cherer, this is a collection with a confident sophomore strut.

Spreading even further out from on the previously established kosmische-centric core – although continuing to be very much propelled by Justin Welsh’s Dingerbeat drumming – the sweatiness and swagger of their recent jams-laced live shows translates into a more communalist mass in the studio.

Hence, opener “Airports” steadily swells and chugs along to a rousing voice-latticing Lodger-spirited coda; “No Reason to Lie” brings in a thick boogie with a call-and-response vocals from Cherer and Riz Maslen; “Japanese Brute” slathers on psych-rock smeariness with a hint of Goat-like garnish; the electro-pulsing of “Star Rider” leans into the lusher neon-illuminated ends of La Düsseldorf; “Sing Pilgrim Sing” ploughs into deep keyboard furrows with more nods to the looser last part of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy; and “Transmission Transmission” ends proceedings with a thuggish low-end-heaviness akin to early-Public Image Limited.

Whilst some listeners might need a lie down after spinning Eat the Gold, to recover from his heady brewing, it’s a rewardingly infectious long-player, from a quartet clearly enjoying being immersed in musical magpie moulding.

Also absorbed in varying degrees of intensity, in wells of obvious inspiration, come three releases from dependable sources.

Enter then, Cédric Pin and Glen Johnson’s duo-billed return with The Allegory of Vanity on Second Language. Effectively, a triple-helping from erstwhile Piano Magicians (who also trade sporadically as Future Conditional), over two CDs and a bonus six-track CD-EP, it finds the twosome – and a small handful of outside helpers – throwing their collective kitchen sinks and hard drives into one quasi-industrial process, just to hear what comes out the other end.

For the primary ten-track EBM-infused portion, the net results imagine what might have happened had Leonard Cohen signed to Mute, moved to Berlin and invited members of DAF, Cabaret Voltaire and Nitzer Ebb to record with him, sometime between the Various Positions and I’m Your Man albums.

On the second CD-encased slab, Johnson sprawls alone across the indulgent but mesmeric near-twenty-minute “Impermanence”, with its collage of glitchy mechanised beats, samples and his most murmured tones, whilst Pin’s similarly-scaled “Resolution” goes for labyrinthine earth-crust burrowing drones. The bonus Nil Omne EP brings the pair back in step for a selection of murky, croaky and clandestine fusions, that both distend and disassemble elements of the main album’s constructions.

At nearly two hours in total, there’s a lot to digest through several sittings, but on this occasion having it all wrapped-up in one bundle makes much more sense than a string of separate outings. Fans of the ever-evolving yet self-contained Piano Magic family world will be more than satisfied with their lot here.

Taking up one of the new generation shoegazer band slots available on the currently thriving Sonic Cathedral, comes Night-bound Eyes are Blind to the Day, the album-length debut from Whitelands. Unashamedly – yet not thoughtlessly – wearing vintage guitar pedal-eyeing influences on their collective sleeves, the foursome connect-up a virtual wormhole from where sounds of the more innocence-framed late-1980s/early-1990s pour into their more complicated and pensive twenty-something lives in the 2020s.

With a high density in both lyrical and musical terms, the inscrutable Night-bound Eyes… doesn’t readily offer easy entry-points – aside from perhaps the twangling “Setting Sun” and the airy balminess of “The Prophet & I”. However, the quartet’s sensitivity and soulfulness bleeds through the thick haziness – notably on “Tell Me About It” with guest vocals from Dottie of labelmates Deary – in a convincing fashion over successive spins, which suggests that there are promising strong foundations to be built upon here.

Over on Woodford Halse sibling-imprint Fenny Compton, things take altogether more organic turns with Kitchen Cynics & Grey Malkin’s We Are All Ghosts. Combining tracks rescued from various lathe-cut seven-inch singles with previously unheard material, the multi-instrumentalist and pseudonym-clad pair cast an earthy yet spectral spell.

The gathered recordings bring together vibes of the Incredible String Band at their most woozy, the antiquarian folk filaments of Alisdair Roberts and the ghostliness of Burd Ellen (whose own Gayle Brogan appears on the elegiac “Babby Ghost’s”), into entrancing lysergic-pastoralism that is threaded in place by aching languid guitars, mysterious studio strata and plaintive vocal tones.

The overall outcome is an eerie but captivatingly comforting affair, that notably marks out Fenny Compton as more than just a side-label-venture.

And finally once more… in diving back into the reliable archival waters of Precious Recordings of London, we find yet another choice BBC vaults raiding presentation, in the ten-inch EP pressed form of Essential Logic’s John Peel Session 21.02.79. As the enterprise’s first foray into the post-punk-era tape shelves, this is a real freewheeling pleasure from Lora Logic’s on/off/on ensemble. Escaping from under the shadows of her better-known work within X-Ray Spex, these four cuts hop, skip and jerk with an ageless wiry vitality.

Stomping through the aptly-named multi-part “Wake Up”, the rowdily off-beat “Shabby Abbott”, the tangled mystic “Alkaline Loaf in the Area” and the skronking “Quality Crayon Wax OK”, these delightfully lateral but sharp songs feel like the recorded end-product of jam sessions involving members of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, The Slits and The Raincoats. A cross-fusion which would certainly explain what secured them a cherished spot on a John Peel session booking list at time.

As the first Precious Recordings outing of 2024 – put out just ahead of two long-awaited session Peel session EPs from The Flaming Stars – this is a reassuring historical must-buy.

Adrian
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