This newsletter is an extension of the 2022 Summer Album Guide, and will evolve to include writing about the community, the city and the world in areas other than hot vinyl and vital music. But for now consider it a gesture to continue the art of the album review, forever disappearing from our print newspapers. - Dave Bidini
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Young Fathers
Heavy Heavy
The truth is you’ll never have enough time in the hours that this universe has gifted you to hear all of the great music you should have heard, and we just have to accept this as we fight through the day to listen to one new band or one new song instead of ‘The Best of Tom Petty’ or ‘One Nation Under A Groove’ or some other piece of music that, remarkably, has never failed you, not even once. More so, you shouldn’t feel bad when you finally hear a record that you’ve been meaning to get to— you shouldn’t feel shamed either—because our Age of Distraction offers excuses not to listen even as it offers ways to listen. There’s a reason why everyone has the same Beyonce or Drake or, I dunno, Zeppelin song coursing through their ear buds, and there’s reason to celebrate when you’re the one subway rider or swimming pool parent or shopping cart pusher who is listen to something different. Buy yourself a donut, crack a beer. Look, you deserve it.
I’d meant to get to the Young Fathers after their Mercury Prize W in 2018, but never did (pro tip for people over 50: a fabulous way into new music is reading nominated lists with phone and streaming platform in hand. Friends apply this to Polaris and it also enriches their interests in this whole prize-giving routine). Heavy Heavy, the YF’s first record after a long hiatus, is a tour de force example of what can happen when a band loses its fealty to traditional song forms while still recognizing the value of structure and a followed pathway. A lot of the songs pick a lane— the lanes vary in length and shape— but what happens inside them is thrilling: the buoyant and evolving seesawing R&B melodies of “Sink and Swim”; the glitter rock thump of “I Saw” in which a Mark E Smith narrative gives way to a Fela Kuti chorus which gives way to an evocation of “The Love Below”; and “Shoot Me Down”, a wailing mournful cry of life and death that has a parade of voices both singular and choral moving across the mix. While crafted and electronically manipulated in most spots, there is also a great natural energy of the work. I am not the first person to discover this record— among peers I’m probably the last— but the music is so vivacious it makes you feel like you’re the only one to have an audience with it; intimate when shouting into your ear, and yet bold and affecting in the quietest sequences.
Listen to and purchase the album at Bandcamp HERE