New artist of the week: serpentwithfeet
What: Experimental monumental love songs
Where: Baltimore
Why: Life is complicated. Nothing is black and white. The divide between good and evil is not absolute. Being an occultist and a heart-on-sleeve singer does not have to be mutually exclusive.
Josiah Wise is the American artist that presents that dichotomy. The 29-year-old has tattooed his face with a pentagram and the words "suicide" and "heaven" yet possessing a voice that could melt many a soul, not with brimstone, but with beauty.
There is no surprise that the artist that presents himself as indefinable makes music that is hard to define, at first. Drawing on a gospel choir boy voice and drawing his musical tones from the world of experimental, classical and R&B, a sound begins to emerge, and it gets deeper under the skin to the core of things than distracting appearances.
"With you I can empty myself of all my rivers, and become a remarkable sky," Wise sings on recent single Bless Ur Heart in an operatic quavering voice that could, on the right day, open the heavens.
His early songs were towering monuments built with majestic horns and orchestral builds but as his debut album proper Soil arrives on June 8th, and the picture emerges of a songwriter who performs with tenderness and fanaticism over songs produced by Katie Gately, that match his monumental sentiments. Serpentwithfeet is music of the heart and speaks of love everlasting and dramatic, emphatic and full of shade.
[ https://youtu.be/x7VtBSanueQ Opens in new window ]
You have to hear this... The Murder Capital – More Is Less
It's rare that a band's first song, not least a live session video of a band's first song, elicits a large reaction but that's what happened last week when The Murder Capital performedg More is Less to camera in a studio in Dublin. The reason? The young band draw on classic punk-rock energy, drawing comparisons to Fugazi and Black Flag and they can definitely play their instruments too.
You have to hear this... Róisín Murphy – All My Dreams
After a par-for-the-course star turn on DJ Koze's new album, the Murph is back tending to her own solo career with a series of four 12" vinyl records recorded with Baltimore dance producer Maurice Fulton. Lead track All My Dreams sounds like it takes inspiration from jazz-funk, the production of Larry Levan, strands of both Murphy's last album Exploitation and her previous band Moloko.
[ https://open.spotify.com/track/4sL9zF71OyDJn1YCIMaMmX? si=3pyUn8WdRuGDN0VzsPqySg Opens in new window ]
