NYC music
fromPitchfork
5 days agoKelela: "Idea 1"
Kelela premiered her new single 'Idea 1' in Manhattan, showcasing her evolution as an experimental pop icon.
One of the more unexpected musical evolutions in recent years has been that of Hen Ogledd from the group's origins as a side project for harpist Rhodri Davies and singer-guitarist Richard Dawson. The knotty, writhing improvisations of the pair's 2013 album Dawson-Davies: Hen Ogledd were like wrestling a piglet in a barbed wire jacket, but with the addition of multi-instrumentalists Dawn Bothwell and Sally Pilkington, by the time of 2018's Mogic, Hen Ogledd had become a bold, poppy but still defiantly experimental quartet.
With one smoggy sample, Lolina lays her mistakes bare: "Come, meet me at the bar/Same time, same place," she invites her friend, a devilish lilt in her voice. "We can talk about our failures, and look good doing it." She sounds almost proud of the backs she's stabbed to get to where she is, even if the rasp in her voice betrays a lingering emptiness.
Dancin' In The Streets is profoundly immersive, but far from insular. The album's guestlist, which includes Sinclair, Switzerland-based singer Cansu Kandemir, and a mysterious figure who goes by "Tha Payne," reads like the membership of a secret society. Boogizm himself is conversant with the warped fringes of contemporary popular music: the Dijon- Mk.gee bitcrush-R&B braintrust, for one, or Dean Blunt, Joanne Robertson, and Elias Rønnenfelt's extended universe of gothic neo-folk.
They push back against the sloshes of pale color as a visual analogue for how her music works. Those reds and browns are like the rhythmic unrest at the heart of her serene songs, where melodies twist and buckle and collapse. And like her frequent collaborator Dean Blunt, Robertson's visual practice bleeds into her music, shaping its tension and motion. She wanders with supple precision across both canvas and song in an improvisatory state, but it's in music that she comes closest to the divine.