Hi Robert. Which album should we not miss this week?
‘Angels & Queens Part I (★★★★☆, 7 songs) the first real album by the musician trio Gabriels. Actually it is half of an album (the second part will be released in March next year), but what a first half. Gabriels has recently appeared at a number of festivals, including Le Guess Who in Utrecht. The three men made quite an impression there. Singer Jacob Lusk’s voice sounded like a resounding brass bell, at times almost like an operatic voice. Very intrusive.
As a child Lusk sang in gospel choirs in church and in 2016 he participated in the talent show American Idol. That turned out to be terrible: a lot was scripted and Lusk was supposed to play a stereotypical role, he told the BBC. This is not for me at all, he thought after that adventure, and he continued as choirmaster.
‘Until classically trained producers Ari Balouzian and Ryan Hope ended up with Lusk’s choir for a commercial soundtrack. It clicked and Balouzian and Hope were so eager to make their own song with Lusk that they came to his church with a mobile studio. Lusk rediscovered the joy in making his own music, with the provisional end result of this record. The album cover on which he is christened should be seen as his musical rebirth, he said.
‘Angels & Queens Part I can best be described as modern soul, as reviewer Gijsbert Kamer also writes, with a lot of electronics. Lusk mainly uses his falsetto voice, you have to love that a bit, with a nice vibrato in it. The music is quite intense and quite dramatic, but there is still a lot of air in the arrangements. It is not completely lubricated. For example, listen to The Blind. Beautiful. I read somewhere in a review that that song sounds like Marvin Gaye is working with Portishead: classic soul combined with slowed down trip hop beats. Also To the Moon and Mack is a very nice number. I think Gabriels is just going to get really big.
What else is recommended this week?
Like Gabriels, British musician Shygirl is pushing music genres. She mixes hip-hop with pop and dance, but also with avant-garde beats. She floats a bit in between everywhere. Music journalists have coined an irritating term for this so that no one really knows what it is anymore: hyperpop. Pop with difficult beats, it mainly means. Yet her debut album nymph (★★★★☆, 12 songs) not a complicated record: DJs can record almost any song in their set.
in the number poison she combines a harmonica with pure house. A very specific sound, with a very catchy text. on shlut, also such a beautiful track, you hear the same principle but with an acoustic guitar. That’s kind of a weird instrument in that environment, but it sounds great. Very nicely arranged and set to music. And even though she works with so many great producers: on nymph Shygirl is in charge. Almost every song has hit power.’
And this is also worth listening to this week:
The only 24-year-old Frisian pop phenomenon Joost Klein is already ready for his eighth album, Friesland (★★★★☆, 14 songs). It is by far his best, writes reviewer Gijsbert Kamer: Joost expresses and expresses his feelings in a brilliant way.
The record series The Bootleg Series are full of previously unreleased Miles Davis recordings. On the seventh album in this series, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: That’s What Happened (★★★★☆, 28 songs), you can hear Davis in blood form during a concert in 1983.