Northern Spy Rock & Indie 15 Items

Record Store Day 2021 Release. Thai Elephant Orchestra, originally released on CD in 2001, features performances by 6 elephants living at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang. The elephants’ poignant phrases and beautiful melodies are meditat

James Joyce once said that if all of Dublin was destroyed, they ought to be able to rebuild it brick by brick just from reading his novels. Wilder Maker's Zion is the first chapter in a musical novel that makes the same claim for Brooklyn, NY. Written by guitarist/saxophonist/singer Gabriel Birnbaum and brought to life with long time collaborators Katie Von Schleicher, Nick Jost (Baroness), Adam Brisbin (Sam Evian, Jolie Holland) and Sean Mullins, Zion is a kaleidoscopic snapshot of years hustling for a break in New York City: waking up at 5 am to pour coffee for the brownstone-owning elite, waiting for a drug dealer on a city bench outside a blurry house party, moving catastrophically from apartment to apartment in the garbage scented heat, glimpsing euphoria through the ritual of taking your place among the anonymous crowd at a music festival, having your heart shattered in front of an audience at a bar, drunkenly contemplating bodega window displays, circling ever closer to something that could either be perfection or the drain, depending on the day. Last year's Saddle Creek single New Streets showcased the band in their poppiest Fleetwood-Mac-channeling mode, breezy summer jams for driving with the windows down, and it got them noticed by NPR, SPIN and Stereogum, but Zion hugely expands their palate of tools. Its influences run from classic 70's Dylan to blown out free jazz saxophone, from Dr. John's swampy psychedelia to Ethiopian sounds picked up from Birnbaum's many years as a member of Debo Band, with hints of Coltrane's classic quartet and nods to The Velvet Undergound. Zion is an omnivorous record. Its wide ranging influences have been hinted at throughout Wilder Maker's adventurous catalogue of self-released material but never explored so fully, or with this kind of wild energy and unclassifiable groove. This is a record to dance to, to cry to, to sing along to, maybe all three at once.

As a photographer, visual artist and member of the cosmic brain-bending trio Devin Gary & Ross, Ross Goldstein has built a layered catalog of softly psychedelic artistic output, but none has been as personal as the sonic spiderweb of his second solo album Inverted Jenny. The last time Ross showed up solo was in 2007 on the quietly-released Trail Songs, a collection of more Americana-leaning songcraft. A decade later, he picks up on threads started on his debut, but continues in a far more inward direction, blurring deftly arranged instrumental backdrops with patient, bucolic songwriting for a discreetly epic modern classic in headphone music. Ross travels through a glowing internal world with these songs, observing moments of both stillness and the sublime from a distance. There's a sheen of loneliness that runs throughout, but never a bitterness. The record opens with a trifecta of Van Dyke Parks-tinged open road songs, but even in the joyful discovery of these songs there's the sense that they're viewed from a loner's perspective. This feeling only grows as things shift from roadside distractions to the plush instrumentals and gentle vibes that make up the record's second half. Gorgeous arrangements set up a playful conversation between warm synths, stoned guitar leads, meticulously placed touches of chamber pop orchestration, and even sounds of the natural world from Ross' own field recordings, always buzzing with life. By the end of the album we've walked alongside for a while, watching the songs navigate their lonesome internal landscape like a late night wearing blissfully into morning. At the end of this night (and every other night, really) there's no answer to be found, no great revelation besides wandering along into another beautiful morning.

Nobody grows up wanting to be an artist’s artist. Appreciated by the sub sect of the sub sect is like being the beauty queen at the leper colony. Hell, anybody who claims they grew up wanting to even be an artist rather than an astronaut or a Cthulhu is probably lying or was a corny kid. Art is hard and degrading and generally bullshit. Your friends will find you irritating and your parents will certainly not throw you a parade. But if you’re an artist you’re an artist; the soul will fuck you every time, what can you do? Shilpa Ray is, through no fault of her own, one of our unsung great artists. Having made her bones with the gothic Sturm und Drang of Beat The Devil and moving forward to the blues erosion of “…and The Happy Hookers” Shilpa Ray has been, armed only with an incomparable voice and harmonium haunted by the ghosts of dead lovers, perpetually crying in the wind, hoisting both middle fingers in the general direction of god. It’s not a life a wise man would choose. Shilpa Ray kicks against the pricks but the pricks keep coming. But, again, what can you do? Well, that’s been the narrative until now. With Last Year’s Savage (maybe a nod to Leonard Cohen maybe a nod to Barrence Whitfield) Shilpa Ray has taken the pain and dark funk of earlier sounds and made explicit the sublimity that was always there just below the surface. The conversation has become less a break up with doors ripped rom their hinges and more the last pained pillow talk before parting. The obsessions with sex, death, bodily functions, and betrayal (not necessarily in that order) remain but Shilpa has expanded the palate to convey the resignation, the simmering discontent of an artist disenfranchised and held down. This is a quieter rage than the music Shilpa Ray has made before, more plaintive and considered, even if it’s the quiet of a hand gripped tight on the axe handle. The music remains gorgeous and stirring in its directness while Shilpa herself remains, thankfully, entirely and inappropriately threatening. Shilpa Ray has, up till this, point, yes, been a “artist’s artist.” Just about every musician in New York City, who doesn’t hate her, loves her and Nick Cave, in both words and deed (having her open up for him and his Bad Seeds often), sings her praises to all with the ears to listen. Obviously there are some who will always prefer lesser versions of the Shilpa Rays of the world (as if there could be more than one), preferably with blue eyes and On Brand Waifishness, but the truth will, eventually out. Talent this big can only be kept down by for so long before the sky cracks and we all drown in the blood of angels. Either way, this is Shilpa Ray’s year.