Don't adjust your speakers - the lyrics are in Turkish - but that doesn't stop vocalist Kutay Soyocak from conveying the deep emotion of the track in tones not dissimilar to those of Nick Cave or Future Islands' Sam Herring.
It's no less dark in English - 'Toz' translates as 'Dust' and the lyrics throughout have themes of death and loss that contrast with the fast-paced yet gothic backing track.
Combine all of the elements and it's an intriguing listen, although you'll need to brush up on your Turkish if you want to sing along.
Jakuzi's vocalist, Kutay Soyocak, says singing in his native tongue is important to allow him to express himself - although it limits the opportunities for the band's music, as it's much less likely to appear on English-speaking playlists and the genre 'Turkish DIY dream pop dark wave' is a little niche.
For Soyocak his homeland is more than just the language in which he sings, it is also the inspiration for the dark themes his lyrics touch upon.
"I think my melancholy comes partly from where I live. This can be seen in the lyrics. I sometimes feel dark, lost and lonely as everyone. Here, the economy and politics make me feel hopeless sometimes.
The future seems blurry but we try to keep our hopes high and continuing what we do. The audience is getting bigger every day and they support us and it is just pure love in our gigs."
Toz is the last single from Jakuzi before their album is released on April 5th. 'Hata Payı' translates as 'tolerance' but a more literal translation is 'part of the mistake'. It spans themes of acceptance of other races and sexualities, along with acceptance of yourself and of your own demons.
Mort Garson's Mother Earth's Plantasia is one of those quirks of history resurrected by the internet - and we're glad it has been rediscovered by a new generation.
Plantasia was originally conceived as an album of music for house plants to listen to (yup) and was given away for free to shoppers when they bought pot plants and other foliage friends from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
Now more than 40 years on from its original 1976 release, Plantasia is being officially reissued for the first time in its history, and that means we can all enjoy Garson's plant-potty compositions on the iconic Moog synthesiser.
In all seriousness, it's a delightful and soothing retro listen that's already available digitally, with a physical release due to follow on June 21st 2019 that we suspect is likely to become a collector's item within a matter of a few years.
Garson's daughter, Day Darmet, says: "My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time. He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then."
So why now? Interestingly enough, it's thanks to the discography database and marketplace Discogs, whose community have expressed growing interest in Mother Earth's Plantasia over the years.
Due to this exceptionally high demand, Discogs and Sacred Bones Records have opted for a formal reissue of the album, making it available both for digital download and in the upcoming physical print run to fill the gap in record collections around the world.
Sacred Bones have made the album available to listen on YouTube, along with all the usual streaming sites, so just hit play above to give it a listen and drift off back to the 1970s.
Seahorse is the lead single from Jackie Mendoza's upcoming EP LuvHz (pronounced 'Love Hurts', y'see...) and much like the heatwave that's hit the UK in late February, it feels as though summer has come early in 2019.
Drifting vocals and underwater audio FX combine to create a soundscape that's more of a seascape, and perfectly in line with the subject matter of the song. Think Morcheeba in the 'Big Calm' era and you're halfway there.
The politics of Seahorse are firmly 2019 though - inspired by the way the creature shares parental responsibility between the genders, with male seahorses carrying the fertilised eggs while the female is in charge of finding food and shelter.
If that sounds a bit heavy for your morning commute or drive to the beach, don't worry, Seahorse is hugely listenable without thinking too much about the message it's making.
"The song's instrumentation mirrors the sense of being underwater; I imagined myself swimming between colourful coral reefs and seagrass. The sonic textures and theme behind this song are echoed throughout the EP."
- Jackie Mendoza
Listen on headphones to get the full chills-on-your-neck effect of the little cricks and chirrups of bubbling water overlaid throughout the track and reflected in the video by the floating geometric shapes that drift across the frame. Sublime.
About Jackie Mendoza
Jackie Mendoza was born in Chula Vista, California, and combines the cultural influences of her hometown with those of her motherland, Tijuana in Mexico. The result is oceanic, eccentric and rooted in Latin beats. Her tracks include ukulele, experimental electronics, and lyrics in both English and Spanish. The six-track LuvHz is due out on April 26th 2019.
Country singer Orville Peck has just released the first official video from his upcoming debut LP, ahead of a tour of Europe and North America in early 2019.
Big Sky is a moody debut for the masked country crooner, packed with uplifting lyrics like "Heartbreak is a warm sensation / When the only feeling that you know is fear".
You can take a look below...
There's plenty to like about this track - it has that classic darkly disturbing country atmosphere, lyrics to haunt your dreams, and a delicate balance between vocals and strings.
Peck sings of lost loves and the conundrum of being tied down by relationships, versus the desire to explore and to roam beneath the titular 'big sky'.
It's a sentiment many people might sympathise with, beautifully expressed over the course of three verses and a couple of choruses.
You can catch Orville Peck live across Europe and North America in the new year:
Jan 4th - Hamilton, ON - Casbah
Jan 5th - Toronto, ON - The Monarch
Feb 28th - London, UK - Islington
Mar 1st - London, UK - Servant Jazz Quarters
Mar 2nd - London, UK - The Shacklewell Arms
Mar 5th - Amsterdam, NL - Sugarfactory
Mar 6th - Berlin, DE - Auster-Club
May 6th - Columbia, MO - The Blue Note
May 7th - Oklahoma City, OK - The Criterion
May 9th - El Paso, TX - Lowbrow Palace
May 10th - Albuquerque, NM - Sunshine Theatre
May 11th - Tucson, AZ - Rialto Theatre
May 12th - Phoenix, AZ - The Van Buren
(*May appearances are supporting Lord Huron)
Big Sky is released through Sub Pop worldwide, with the exception of Canada, where it is available through Royal Mountain Records.
Orville Peck's debut LP is due to follow in early 2019.
The back story to Laura Gibson's Empire Builder, released on April 1st on City Slang, is quite astonishing. Back in 2012, she released La Grande, and in the summer of 2014 she decided to relocate from Portland to New York - taking a break from music to study creative writing instead.
Her journey began with a trip on the Empire Builder, a rail route between the Pacific North West and Chicago that has legendary status in the US. This part of her story - a journey in the literal as well as the figurative sense - might be enough in its own right to inspire a collection of new songs, but it was eclipsed by the events that followed.
At the end of March 2015, a gas explosion blew up Gibson's apartment building, destroying almost everything she owned, including most of her recent work and all of her musical instruments. Two people were killed in the blast.
Empire Builder becomes a metaphor for this entire chapter in her life, from the initial rail ride, to the time spent completing her studies while sleeping on friends' couches and spare beds, and all while literally rebuilding her own empire, replacing not only the instruments she had lost, but the lyrics and music too.
The result is a quite incredible album, ten tracks that almost alternate between punchy defiance and melancholy reflection, lyrics that speak of loss, and of recovery, and of simply refusing to quit. These are the big feelings of every human life, and I think most listeners will find at least one track that resonates almost uncannily with their own life and experiences.
Not Harmless
The first of our preview tracks is Not Harmless, one of the more defiant tracks on Empire Builder, with a similarly feisty video you can watch below.
From the first second, Not Harmless is punchy in an instrumental style reminiscent of some of the best Tom Waits songs - heavy on percussion, on rhythm rather than melody, a slap beat that sustains through the whole track, creating a sense of time passing, a second by second tick-tock effect.
Gibson's own description of the song is similarly no-nonsense:
"In very simple terms, Not Harmless is about standing up for myself: defining womanhood on my own terms. It may be a critique of social expectations, but more so it's a critique of my own behaviour and insecurities. I must add that I have always, always wanted to write a song in which I was the villain, to hold that sort of agency, to reimagine myself in my most self-serving no-fucks-given form. So lines like, 'I'll be the thief you forgot to chase, the bramble sprung back in the hero's face' gave me great pleasure to write."
As for the video, director Derrick Belcham puts some context on the physical assaults suffered by Gibson throughout, as a metaphor for the assaults that come from within:
"It's an attempt to capture a multi-angle viewpoint of the various aspects of the singer's insecurities in the music video environment. Each of the dancers embodies a specific discomfort or complex that raises its head during the process of being on camera, exposing oneself through songwriting and 'being' in the world in general. Their actions reflect the shifting battle that an ego faces when the spotlight is turned on it."
Not Harmless is not the most 'listenable' song on Empire Builder, by any means - other tracks are more melodic, less confrontational on the ear, but of course that's not what everybody will be looking for from this album anyway. What the song does offer is a kind of inclusive defiance, almost a justification of relying on the darker side of your character when you need to find your inner strength, and I think that's something a lot of people will relate to as well.
Empire Builder
The title track is one of the most astonishing songs I've heard in recent years, a fist of emotion to punch into the chest of anyone who's ever lost somebody, and hoped to someday reconnect. I'm delighted to be able to preview this one below.
I had goosebumps within seconds of the start of the song, before Gibson began singing. There were tears in my eyes after the first few lines. Maybe the lyrics just hit home with me on this particular day, and there are certainly personal reasons for that, but I think I would have loved this song just as much if I had heard it for the first time on any other day. It's elegant, gentle, with a more muted percussion track that still echoes that sense of passing time; the inevitability of change.
"Oh, forget I said love.
And also don't forget I said love.
We are not alone
and we are more alone than we've ever been.
So hurry up and lose me
hurry up and find me again."
There's no long, slow fade at the end of the track, as you might expect, but an equally elegant end to the beat and a soft cymbal crash. It's a small symbol of the authenticity of this album - songs where the acoustics are held almost in a kind of reverence, given their own voice, not simply faded to silence when they are no longer needed. There's love here, and hope.
I'm in love with Empire Builder - the song and the album. It tackles the biggest emotions in all our lives without becoming pretentious. Musically it's beautiful, the very best qualities of its own time, with hints of half a century before it, the occasional lingering note that wouldn't be out of place in Unchained Melody or something similar. This is timeless subject matter, with enduring acoustics, and I look forward to revisiting Empire Builder time and again in the years ahead.
Once in a while, in amongst the latest chart releases and indie EPs, you get sent something to review that is a little special or unusual. Vaadat Charigim are both.
The Israeli trio formed in 2012 and released their first LP with the title The World is Well Lost; on September 25th 2015, they will follow it with the UK release of their second album, Sinking as a Stone, from which Hadavar Haamiti is taken.
Already some readers will be thinking "boo, Israel" and while we're not going to launch a political debate here, it's worth taking a moment to recognise that Vaadat Charigim - consisting of vocalist Yuval Haring, drummer Yuval Guttman and bassist Dan Fabian Bloch - are just three people who happen to be from Israel.
They are not the Israeli government, although the turbulence of their surroundings has a clear place in the tone of their recordings.
Haring says: "Instead of singing about missiles falling on a shopping mall and naming the missile and the shopping mall, I am taking the essence of that, and breaking it down to its basic mechanism. I am dealing with it piece by piece, as fragments."
The politics of a nation should never prevent artistic expression of any kind - although, as is the case here, it can certainly sculpt the tone of a musical work.
Vaadat Charigim have a frankly amazing sound, like an Israeli Stone Roses singing in a cathedral, choral and anthemic, moving and contradictorily uplifting.
I can only imagine the sense of affirmation their music might carry in more optimistic times. I hope we might find out, one day.
Until then, their music carries a quite different message, and one that would be all but impossible to convey in words alone.
Vaadat Charigim's second album, Sinking as a Stone, is due for UK release on September 25th via Burger/Anova records.
One worth looking out for later this year is Cristobal and the Sea's debut album Sugar Now, confirmed for an expected release date of October 2nd on City Slang.
It's good news for anyone who caught the group's EP Peach Bells back in December 2014, and it's great to see the album follow less than a year later.
What should we expect? Plenty of variety, not least thanks to the band's multinational membership: Spain's Ale Romero on vocals and bass, Portugal's Joao Seixas on vocals and guitar, Corsica's Leila Seguin on flute and vocals, and the UK's own Joshua Oldershaw on drums.
In terms of genre, there's an equally eclectic mix, and Joao explains: "We don't ever consciously make our music sound like a genre." Josh adds: "The Latin element is always there, but it naturally adapts to whatever theme is most prevalent, whether it's psychedelic, or more poppy, or sometimes a bit disco." Sunset of our Troubles is a summery, almost Caribbean track, so it's good to see this one is available already - no need to wait until October to get your hands on it, just hit play on the SoundCloud player below.
If this is an indication of the album as a whole, Sugar Now will be worth waiting for - and with any luck, there'll be some autumn sunshine to enjoy at the same time. Even if not, it's likely to make the perfect soundtrack for Christmas shopping too - even if the big day is still six months away right now!
Bones is the latest album from Son Lux, AKA Denver-born musician Ryan Lott. It's his first album on Glassnote, after leaving Joyful Noise Recordings in 2014, but it bears all the hallmarks of an artist whose work is probably more widely known than his name is.
If you're not familiar with Son Lux, take a look back at our review of Lanterns in 2013; you can also hear Lott's work on the soundtrack to the Bruce Willis time-travel movie Looper, and on Ned Benson's 2013 trilogy The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.
Bones is typically dramatic and fast-paced, an energetic and acoustically rich tapestry of music that yet again proves Lott's talent for composition in a genre he has all but made his own.
Well, the new judges (or mentors, if you prefer) for The X Factor 2015 have been announced, and they're likely to leave Simon Cowell looking like a dad at a disco.
He and Cheryl Cole Fernandez-Versini are due to be joined for the new series by Rita Ora and everyone's favourite where-the-hell-did-he-come-from DJ, Nick Grimshaw.
Grimmy, Cheryl and Rita are The X Factor mentors 2015
'Grimmy' is a contradiction in terms, in that he's been around for ages yet every time he gets a new job, everyone immediately says he lacks the experience for it - he started out on E4 nearly a decade ago, and has worked on pretty much every channel there is since then.
If you like him, that's great. If not, it's hard to avoid his leering face or just-got-out-of-bed voice, whether on BBC Radio One, hosting his god-awful panel show Sweat The Small Stuff on BBC Three, or popping up like a wasp at a picnic on Children in Need or the recent TFI Friday revival.
Rita Ora is by no means the most popular person in the world, so it's saying something that she seems to be the better received of the two new mentors (at least she's a singer, right??).
Personally I've never found anything much to dislike about her, and she did a decent job as guest judge during her previous one-off appearance on The X Factor, so good luck to her.
In fact I'm more than happy to say good luck to all concerned - I can't bring myself to watch anything Grimmy is involved with, but the presenting duo of Caroline Flack and Olly Murs should see the Saturday night show in safe hands, and it's understandable that some young blood is being pumped into a show whose biggest recent successes have been the just-started-wearing-pullups groupings of Little Mix and One Direction.
For the rest of us, jaded by more than a decade of dodgy decisions from the judges and convenient 'deadlocks' to shift the blame back on to the public vote, it feels like a lifetime since Saturday night telly involved Mrs O calling Steve Brookstein a dickhead on live national TV.
Long-time Popsiculture favourite Katie Waissel made her return to The X Factor this weekend to perform in what was dubbed The X Factor Medley - basically a cover of The Time (Dirty Bit) by the Black Eyed Peas.
You can watch the full performance below - Katie arrives near the end and frankly does an impressive job of rescuing what is otherwise several minutes of absolute car-crash television.
As usual it seems set out to humiliate the performers, rather than to bring them back as heroes of series gone by, and Katie once again brings an undeserved amount of grace and elegance to the X Factor stage which pretty much sums up how she's always been treated by the show.
But none of that matters - what matters is her tweet just before 11pm on December 13th (just a few minutes ago, as I write this) which has really set the Katie-cat among the pigeons for her Twitter followers.
And just in case she deletes it or it won't load for any reason, that is "Bye bye London!! See y'all on the other side.... #seeyounextyear #confirmed #chair".
Does this mean we can expect to see Katie Waissel judge X Factor 2015? Is the 'chair' she refers to one of the coveted X Factor mentors' chairs?
This IS Katie after all, so nothing is impossible... watch this space for official confirmation, if that really is what La Waissel was hinting at.
Either way it was a cathartic return to the show for Katie, who also posted on her Instagram account, where a picture paints a thousand words (or 65 words, in Katie's case...) and allowed her to send a message too long to tweet.
Again, will this 'new chapter' see Katie Waissel mentor for X Factor 2015? Or are the ever-hopeful Waissel Warriors jumping to conclusions?
It's too early to be certain, but you can bet her fans will have their fingers crossed - Katie has written X Factor columns for magazines and websites over the past couple of years, so her association with the show has never faded (and frankly, never will).
With strong opinions and no fear of expressing them, personally I think Katie would be a fantastic X Factor mentor for 2015; she might even be enough to convince me to watch it again.
If she is confirmed for one of the mentors' chairs in 2015, I'll just be hoping the media are a little kinder in their coverage of her than they were when she was a contestant on the show.
UPDATE: What if she meant The Voice?
Just a quick addition to this - what if when Katie said 'see you on the other side', she meant it more literally than anyone has realised?
People don't tend to talk about The X Factor judges/mentors in terms of the chairs they sit in, but there is of course a similar show where the mentors' chairs are a much more significant part of the production - The Voice.
It's on 'the other side' in the sense that it's on the BBC rather than ITV, and the mentors change much more regularly than they do on The X Factor.
What if... maybe, just maybe... Katie's 'confirmed chair' for next year is over at the Beeb? Personally I think she'd be a great fit for the show.
