Best New Tracks: 22nd January 2018 – 28th January 2018

James Blake: “If The Car Besides You Moves Ahead”

Before James Blake rubbed shoulders with hip-hop and RnB loyalty, he made haunting soundscapes with skeletal percussion, jittery synths and warped vocals. Human presence, often, felt absent in his music. As his career became more established, soul and RnB influences began to purge Blake’s palette, bringing with it more fully formed songs and a stage for his arresting vocal.

On Blake’s new track, “If The Car Besides You Moves Ahead,” the human presence has once again wavered for sounds from a more extra-terrestrial plain. A wave of lo-fi crackle creates a malevolent fog for the cloudy synth bass and whistling loop to lurk through.

This crepuscular tone creates the perfect canvas for Blake to splash his electronically manipulated vocals like a splatter painting. His voice is fragmented, chopped up, screwed and pitch-shifted into a tormented, glitchy croon. His vocal without manipulation is already stunning, effortlessly flipping from a brooding baritone to the rattling timbre of his falsetto. If anything, the studio wizardry on show here makes his vocal even more breathtaking.

Despite this bot-like aesthetic, the lyrics and composition make for a fully formed and fantastic avant-garde pop song. If this is an indication of what James Blake’s new record will sound like, we’re in for his most visionary record to date.

Car Seat Headrest: “Cute Thing”

In a world of blindly loyal fans and record label greed, it’s commonplace for old albums to be reissued with a new, glossy mix and twenty bonus tracks of demo quality shit. However, re-recording an album which has already been released is a completely different story.

Car Seat Headrest‘s sixth album, “Twin Fantasy,” was released back in 2011. But the scrappy quality and unfinished ideas have niggled at the mind of Will Toledo, the driving creative force behind CSH. Lo-fidelity was a happy by-product back then. But ever since his major label debut, “Teens of Denial,” Toledo has chased a fuller, more fleshed out sound. This newfound professionalism has lead him to revisit “Twin Fantasy,” to tart up the muddy mixing and half-baked tunes into something that’s more befitting of his recent work.

Whilst it is a bizarre artistic decision, it’s hard to argue with the results on “Cute Thing,” the second track to be released from the remade project so far. The intro is much more dynamic, with discordant singular strums and Toledo’s gravelly croon making way for ramshackle fuzz which cuts through the mix like an industrial saw.

It all tumbles into a frantically bashed out solo on what sounds like a marimba, before the track takes back off where it begun. Where white space was filled by crackle on the original track, there now exists harmonised vocals, spidery rhythm guitars and more bombastic drums.

The mixing, instrumentation and composition have improved drastically on what was already a fantastic tune. And all of this is done without losing the rawness of the original recording. You may think that new Car Seat Headrest music is better than a rehash of their old tunes. But in this kind of form, “Cute Thing” is a completely different beast which stands next to the best work Toledo has produced thus far.

Cabbage: “Arms of Pleonexia”

Post-punk has seen a steady revival during this decade, ever since the Scandinavian scene found itself plastered on the pages of music publications around the world.

The U.K has had a steady slew of amazing post-punk groups coming through of late, but Cabbage have a crossover appeal which could see them become the pride of place on Britain’s post-punk mantel.

The likely louts have come through with another scuzzy slice of angst on “Arms of Pleonexia,” a track which confronts the blood thirsty foreign policy of Western war horses, “How long ’till we take responsibility/Arms of Pleonexia who sold the guns and the massacres.”

The compressed fuzzy guitars, trebly bass and Lee Broadbent’s unhinged howl are atypically post-punk, but the sing-a-long, soft-verse-loud-chorus dynamic makes it an indie rock banger you’d be likely to hear on the sticky dance floor of a dingy Indie Club basement.

If they stick to the strong gritty messages and avoid the lad-rock tropes they have tended to fall into in the past, then 2018 is theirs for the taking.