Sunless '97's new track, Azul, fleshes out the band's sound, from the summer-tinged, hazey-floatey harmonics of their Making Waves EP. Azul is a strangely hypnotic soundscape of 2 Step beats, jazz pianos, saxophone, and multi-tracked vocals. Which improbably all slots together, effortlessly. A million miles away from Ed's previous project Larrikin Love.
Azul by SUNLESS '97
We've been looking forward to this since it was hinted at in the preview doc for Bobby Womack's new album, his first in twelve years. Now it's here, and the interplay between Bobby's and Lana's vocals is as good as we were hoping. They act as ying-yang to each other; Bobby's scratchy and gruff gives way to Lana, smooth as honey and full of range, but the star of the track, even if it's keeping out the lime light, is Richard Russell's production work, which underpins the whole thing and stops it from slipping into two separate halves.
In other good news, it was announced recently that Bobby has got
over the cancer that he was diagnosed with earlier this year. Get
well soon.
Becoming Real is finally releasing all of his pent up potential, this record following up his 12" on Get Me from earlier this year. His work has finally worked his own, isolationist, headphone niche.
If Grime was a masculine assault upon the danceability of UK Garage, then Becoming Real's Solar Dreams/Neon Decay, is a effeminisation of Grime; and rather than drawing it back towards to UKG it instead exists in a parallel, weed flecked, world. It's Grime ripped of its empty braggadocio, yet keeping and developing upon the cold, spareness of the instrumentals into its own, beautiful, thing.
