A selection of Brownswood Recordings' finest.
GhostPoet
Moody, drowsy words flow bleakly, brooding, intimately bruised.
Each reviewer of Ghostpoet offers their own synonyms of ‘dark poet’ to describe singer Obaro Ejimiwe. But Ghostpoet himself best summarised his music with the self-aware title of his 2011 album, ‘Peanut butter blues and Melancholy Jam’
It is music that gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.
The Smiths and The Streets brought colour to grey English towns. Ghostpoet uses his own personal palette of cutbacks, of KFC in the North, and with Film4 Tuesdays as the highlight of his week. A stream of consciousness over heavy, wavy beats, personal tales of porridge and of running in an English landscape.
With his cryptic, first person style, and a vocal that remains within narrow parameters of the lower pitch, Ghostpoet creates an intriguing and distinctive sound in his own niche in the landscape, in a place he is clearly comfortable in.
William Anderson
Under an East Coast Moon
This album was inspired by the eerie soft light from an East Coast Moon casting shadows over the Suffolk landscape. Suffolk is not the most obvious musical spawning ground, a gentle landscape emblematic of England as we would like it to be again. But somewhere in the corners of the stillness and behind the net curtains of a rose tinted cottage window Anderson has drawn out to the first pieces of unpleasantness that may ever have taken place in Suffolk.
It is an album of stories, for some artists (famously an argument for Bob Dylan songs) songs with a strong and engaging narrative can ride out a forgettable melody and listeners can visualize as their own personal movie. However for Anderson the production and combined talent of Tom Skinner, Finn Peters, Shawn Lee, Tom Rodwell, Tom Herbert, Gil Cang, Valerie Etienne and Alice Grant, create a perfect atmosphere and forge a better scene than any set designer could.
You can hear the waves, as Anderson talks to a man by the shore ”Says he’s listening to the sea”, and feel the atmosphere of the haunting tale of the ”surrounded and bloodied” Creek Men. Anderson sings, “the land was trying to shout back, he couldn’t understand”, but really Anderson has created an album that has an understanding of the sea, the fields, the land and the stories that they hold.
To seal the sound, Anderson has that low-end, lots-of-bourbon, bottomless voice that Nick Cave and Tom Waits have, or as RZA describes Waits, “a voice with the smoothness of Barry White, but the raspiness of a mountain lion”.
The album for all musos and pessimists who cry “there’s no good music these days”.
Mala in Cuba.
A dubstep producer soaks up Cuban culture and makes an album…. risky?
Perhaps not when he has an individual sense of rhythm, Jamaican roots is wisely guided by Gilles Peterson.
Gilles wanted to “do something a little bit experimental… out of the blue” so immersed Mala into the Cuban culture. Mala embraced the culture, digested it, and regurgitated it. Mala entered himself into a learning experience. He was sent on a school research trip by Gilles and didn’t just pick up some sounds; he feels he was more inspired by the people, the stories and the atmosphere of Cuba. He returned with one of those ‘show and tells’ that the teacher is very proud of and the peers are envious of.
This is not just a coffee shop album and it is not just a Buena Vista Social Club 2k13 mix up. Mala is ‘in Cuba’, not ‘dressed up as a Cuban’. The album has weight, in that dark dubstep way. But it is lifted and given life by the various brass, handclaps, melodies, licks, chord progressions, rhythms and chattering percussion that are distinctly Cuban.
I am not ‘up’ on dubstep, nor am I culturally aware of all things Cuba; Castro is the good guy right?
I imagine it will be a different listening experience for those who know Mala. And for those who are more a connoisseur of Afro-Cuban music who will I am sure provide a list of artists more authentic/more ground-breaking/mind-blowing/just better… and that is swell. But I think Mala is a good guy too.