Bisk
This week’s round-up of all things new music finds Getintothis’ Patrick Clarke on a country retreat, unearthing old obsessions, electronic bangers and the best in new London hip-hop.
I’ve been back at home for Easter for an only-slightly deserved break this week, heading back to the interminably pleasant town in the arse-end of the countryside where I spent a ponderous adolescence. Within days I’ve regressed straight back to my younger self; by day doing little but haul the mighty Tranmere Rovers to the dizzy heights of the Europa League on FIFA 14, by night clicking through Soundcloud, eyes glazed, until the early hours.
It’s strangely fitting, then, that I should come across the new track Beneath the Concrete from LUH, the new guise of former WU LYF frontman Ellery Jucifer James (née Roberts), and collaborator Ebony Hoorn, given my absolute obsession with Ellery‘s older guise when I last lived here.
WU LYF have been overlooked in the years since, but for a brief six months or so at the start of the decade they, and their brilliant, cult-like live shows, were the only thing that mattered to thousands upon thousands of young people. I’ve still got the bandanna/denim jacket uniform.
With LUH, much of what made WU LYF so appealing back then has carried over – the shroud of semi-anonymity, the quasi-cryptic initialling (the Lucifer Youth Foundation is dead; long live Lost Under Heaven); and most essentially Ellery‘s feverish frontman’s howl. Instrumentally, too, there’s the same unapologetic, spacious bombast, though freshened with crisper production and a tint of electronic texture.
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Vancouver’s Sasha Jan Rezzie, meanwhile, slipped through the net earlier this month with the straight-up banger of new 12″ All My Dreams. Brisk and energetic yet breezy and spacious, the record’s a delight rarely paralleled in modern dance; from the foggy grooves of the title track to the bright pumps of Thinking Too Loud, it’s a joy from start to finish.
London hip hop up-and-comer Bisk‘s new EP freemorphine, however, is anything but joyful. A dark, twisted fifteen minutes of sumptuous gloom layered around heavy boom-bap beats, Bisk‘s flow is insouciant and louche, spinning opaque tales of overdose and alienation with hypnotic devilry.
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