2021 Q3
Mon Laferte - No Lo Vi Venir
Aida Bossa - Azúca/El Loro y La Lora
Masked Wolf - Astronaut In The Ocean
Beck - Dark Star
The Slits - I Heard It Through the Grapevine
Brian Eno w/Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams - Horse
Graham Nash - Better Days
Click on individual songs to link to Bandcamp, where you can easily buy merch or just give the artists some $$$
Q3 has a kind of “grab bag” feel to it. Even for Faux Sounds, there’s some rando stuff going on. Which, honestly, is how a bulk of this list came together - things that were hanging around, but never making it into another list. The leftovers from Q1 and Q2, basically.
Yet, we have some gold here. Two unlikely, but winning covers at the center of the list, with Los Miticos del Ritmo doing Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, and The Slits doing I Heard It Through the Grapevine. They both totally work, which they probably shouldn’t.
Many of the songs have something a little “outside” in the middle - from LUMP’s extended vocal tomfoolery in “Animal,” to Beck’s harmonica solo in the middle of “Dark Star.” The two pop-iest songs - “Astronaut in the Ocean” and “Bring U Down” - are both barely over two minutes long. Which makes them a little bit more enjoyable, I think.
There are so many rhythms that can give you that feeling. The one where you have to bob your head, at the very least. The Garifuna Collective continues to sound to me simultaneously like something I’ve always heard and one that I’m hearing for the first time. This grooves so hard.
Ream Deranoi’s voice on Fai Yen is something you could not make up. The way they’ve found to record and mix her voice here puts it front and center, and it sounds great. Damn. The harp kills me every time.