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Various Artists, Real World Records Label Sampler
Since its inception in 1989, the Real World label has been home to some of the most forward-thinking, boundary-shaking music from around the globe. Founded by Peter Gabriel as a kind of recorded complement to his WOMAD festival, the label soon took on a life of its own, releasing records by giants like Tabu Ley Rochereau, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jocelyn Pook and more. This sampler is a good place to start if you’re looking to discover the label’s all-encompassing sound.
Deafheaven, Sunbather
Carving out the perfect middle ground between Slowdive and Marduk
There are few commonalities between the melancholy drone of shoegazing and the furious assault of black metal, which makes finding common ground tricky work. Even hybrid groups like France’s Alcest and China’s Dopamine tend to downplay aggression for atmospherics. But with their second full-length, Sunbather, San Francisco’s Deafheaven carve out the perfect middle ground between Slowdive and Marduk. Three of the songs clock in at nine minutes or more, giving the band plenty of space to ebb and flow between brutality and bliss. The opening track “Dream House” sets the pace with nearly 30 seconds of hazy guitar distortion before bursting into grinding guitars, effect-saturated hooks, thunderous blast beats and roaring demonic vocals. As schizophrenic as the blend sounds on paper, the album coheres beautifully because Deafheaven have discovered the point where delicate enervation and furious despair meet, and they’ve mapped it from every angle.
Parts of Sunbather, like the undistorted instrumental “Irresistible,” are reflective and textural, while the title track is more aggro, contrasting ringing guitar melodies with a swarming distortion and shifting between slow, tumbling drums and blastbeat tempos. “Please Reminder” melds three minutes of Skullflower-style chainsaw noise collage with another three minutes of soft, lazy strumming, while “Windows” combines apocalyptic spoken word with haunting ambient feedback. But it’s the longer tunes, including “Vertigo” and “Pecan Tree” where Deafheaven discard any sense of artsy pretension for mesmeric compositions filled with yearning, violence and beautiful sadness.
Orchestra Super Mazembe, Mazembe @ 45 ROM Vol. 2
Glorious and uplifting tracks from the late '70s and early '80s
In the ’70s, it wasn’t unusual for soul and funk singles to be so long that one track was split over both sides of the record. But in Kenya, in the ’70s and ’80s, every single was like that. Five minutes was never enough; the audience wanted a track to last eight or nine minutes and the artists were happy to comply. And there was another, more important, reason: people didn’t have the money to buy entire albums, but they could afford singles.
Orchestra Super Mazembe, from Zaire via Nairobi, were the kings of this Kenyan pop scene. They hit it big in 1977 with their infectious “soukous” style, a sped-up descendant of Congolese rumba. Their lilting vocal harmonies and cascading guitars struck a chord across East Africa, and once they reached the top they stayed there until the mid ’80s, releasing more than 40 singles, all of them hits. The fact that they sang in Lingala, a language from the other side of the continent, was immaterial. This was all about the music.
These nine tracks from the late ’70s and early ’80s are glorious and uplifting, with glistening lead guitar, fiery horns and percussion that defy the feet to stay still. There’s a formula to the Super Mazembe sound: each track has a four-part structure, starting off restrained before catching fire around the two-minute mark, then fading out halfway so the record could be flipped over. Then the main riff returns, fast and frantic. Sometimes, as on “Yo-Mabe” horns trade lines with the guitar to send the music spiralling higher and higher. On “Mwana Nyiau,” the singers miaow like cats, while the music teeters on the edge of chaos, a piece of brilliant madness.
There’s so much warmth here that it almost feels like it raises the temperature a couple of degrees. The pleasure is palpable — you can almost hear the smiles. Yes, there’s a formula to the music, but the effect is so joyful it really doesn’t matter.