Listen: You — Abrahamblue

Abrahamblue is a Belgium-based musician whose desire to escape the everyday trappings of modern urban life in Antwerp led him to turn to music making. Having felt overwhelmed, Abrahamblue says, “Life just felt like a race, city life was overwhelming”. Music became his escape:

“It reminded me how I felt when I quit school at 17 to chase my dreams, with nobody to show me the way, so I had to learn to play all the instruments myself.”

As a person, Abrahamblue is familiar with the experience of being an outsider. Born to Syrian-Palestinian parents, he moved to the city of Antwerp when he was just five. Without access to a TV, his cultural experience was focused on classic Arabic singers, leading him to experience an identity crisis which made him unable to feel the security of home.

In time, music became Abrahamblue’s path out of his uncertainty — James Brown and Michael Jackson exposed him to pop music, and the myriad of genres that converge on it. In time, he discovered Miles Davis, and from there got deeper into jazz, bossanova, hip-hop and soul, before eventually starting to teach himself how to play.

You, Abrahamblue’s latest release, rides on a soft and melodic cloud of gentle melancholy. The vocals convey an easy-going earnestness, the emotional gravity front and centre. At the same time, there is an easiness that dispels any notion of melodrama.

The style of Abrahamblue’s performance on You reminds me of André 3000’s flow — artistically embellishing the music’s emotion without making it feel like a ‘performance’. It suits the jazz-like free form experimentalism on display here — the vocal is part of the music, another instrument to convey feeling, as opposed to being above the music or dominating it. The result feels natural, like slipping on someone else’s coat and deciding it suits you better than your own. Abrahamblue brings me into his emotional truth, one of longing met with slight uncertainty, and suddenly, it feels like mine.

Watch: Nothing Constructive — Kitten Heel

The video for Nothing Constructive’ kicks off with the prerequisite sass deserving of a record that sounds like it has already checked out, the band’s singer walking into a room with his band already playing, as if he is running late for practice. Before he has really found his spot, he has launched into his vocal - this time as if he can’t wait to get it done.

Kitten Heel are a six-piece outfit hailing from the NSW city Wollongong in Australia, led by writer/producer pair Jareth Leslie-Evans and Jourdain Vitiello. The sound of Factory Records and Modular channels through their music, but you can also hear more than a dash of DFA and LCD Soundsystem in the nervous energy on display here.

The tense anxiety Nothing Constructive seethes with is rooted in an everyday reality we all have to deal with, as the described by Kitten Heel:

“Nothing Constructive is essentially about my detachment from Social Media. The sheer volume of false and ill-informed opinion, all championing a self-righteous chest beating — is baffling. For a long time, it snared my ability to do anything else. I’d become angry, it crippled my creativity — which in turn scared me beyond comprehension. So, I deleted all platforms and let blissful ignorance sooth me once more. The clip plays with the dominant and submissive nature of that relationship.”

You can see that dominant and submissive relationship is invoked in the bindings that ensnare the band as they play, gradually crippling their free will.

The attitude stoked vocal gives Nothing Constructive a feeling of lethargic ambivalence, but those brooding synths make it feel like it could tip over into anarchy with a moment’s notice. Nothing Constructive never quite goes there, but I would love an extended version of this — I can imagine the chaotic cacophony of instruments increasingly disjointed from the locked groove like melody they start with. An artistic protest evoking the din we so readily expose ourselves to on social media.

Thanks to The Band, Mane Collective & Create or Die. Director - Jareth Leslie-Evans DOP - Guy Duncan Lighting - Guy Duncan & Blake Lisk Edit - Guy Duncan Col...

Premiere: I Know — Andrea

A song that starts with its vocal front and centre, I Know takes the best part of a minute to unveil its true colours. And when it does, those colours are luminous... this is a song that could stand on the strength of Andrea’s vocal performance, but instead it embellishes them with production that conveys the feelings the vocals do.

The fit between a song’s story and its sound is always the key to the best music, in my opinion. It is for that reason that I can get behind vocal processing when Drake and The Weeknd apply it to vocals, but not when it is applied without thought, as a crutch. Those R&B stars rose to fame with music that dealt in shame and obsession, and those vocal effects existed as if they were wanting to anonymise themselves — sins admitted within the relative safety of the confession booth. Yet I can’t stand to hear them applied so damn often these days, without any apparent thought, mimicking that sound but none of the emotion.

I Know is a love song that quivers with the excitement of an instant attraction, and Andrea worked with composer and producer Aleksandar Masevski to bring that feeling into the music itself. As it transitions from its slow and considered opening, I Know opens up like a bird unfurling its wings, drum & bass percussion and big rave-like synth stabs and acid synths lifting the track to create the kind of transcendent energy that we feel in those moments of weightlessly falling in love.

Andrea’s sound draws on her experience as a child in Harlem, surrounded by gospel, soul and R&B during a trip her parents took for a year whilst she was five. Upon her return to her native North Macedonia, she was hooked on music. Here on I Know, Andrea channels her musical roots whilst elevating them with modern accents, having been encouraged to invest in her talent by Masevski.

Check out the Premiere of I Know below:

Listen: Time Now For Ghosts - Slow Shudder

As we entered into the final week of September, I noticed how quickly our days were filled with autumnal sensations... In one week, my son went from wearing shorts to school to wearing a rain coat, and I suddenly found myself still working at the point where my Mac would flip over to dark mode… Something I had kind of forgotten it even did.

Normally I head into the closing months of the year with a heavy heart. I much prefer the long evenings and warming sensations of summer over the other seasons, and yet this year I find myself longing for the coziness of autumn. The idea of being able to wear long sleeves and jumpers, and slipping into a coat and sturdy leather boots before heading out suddenly feels comforting. I have no doubt this has a lot to do with COVID-19 and little to do with me changing. For one, I am sure most of us will be glad to see the back of 2020, but I also think there is something pleasing about seeing the passing of time at a point where most other things seem unchanging.

Into this transitional experience enters Slow Shudder’s Time Now For Ghosts, a song the manages to sound like browning leaves releasing their grasp from tree branches and riding the winds to places unknown. Quietly beautiful vocals spin and twirl, buoyed by the melodic movement portrayed by electronic synths. The resulting piece feels contemplative, mildly melancholic and yet forward looking.

That feeling suits the emotional theme of the song, which was inspired by introspection about unresolved past relationships, itself triggered by a series of unusually vivid dreams. The experience of thinking about those kinds of relationships can be an intriguing one. Recognising, much like those brown leaves, how we have aged and changed in the time that has passed. Wondering whether that change would have brought us closer together or pushed us further apart from that person, or those people, with whom intense connections never quite blossomed in the way that we might have hoped.

Slow Shudder is Amanda Mayo, a producer, DJ, vocalist and songwriter who now resides in Seattle, WA, having previously lived in Miami, New York, London and LA. The song comes from Mayo’s experiences of unpacking her memories, something she has only found the time and space for as a result of being in lockdown. That, in combination with a healthy dose of the weird world of Haruki Murakami, gave rise to Time Now For Ghosts:

“When lockdown went into effect, I began having daily dreams about the first person I romantically loved, who unexpectedly passed away just over four years ago, as well as other people in my life with whom I was previously involved. I recognized that there were a lot of unprocessed emotions there, which I’d compartmentalized over the years instead of fully accepting and feeling.

Throughout this time, I was reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, which explores the concept of parallel realities. The song title Time Now For Ghosts is a line from the book that struck a chord with me, as it made me think of a concept within physics: quantum entanglement, described by Einstein as ‘spooky action at a distance’.

It’s interesting to think about the concept of entanglement within the framework of relationships and memory. Obviously, when writing, I was considering it less from a particle physics standpoint and more as a thought experiment, based in emotion - I suppose you could call it an emotion experiment.”

Check out Time Now For Ghosts below.

Listen: Better As Friends — Eighty Ninety

Better As Friends is one of those rare records that represents perfectly crafted pop music: it is undoubtably polished enough to be commercially successful, and yet it has enough of an edge to it that I’m pulled in by its authenticity.

Eighty Ninety are an American duo comprised of brothers Abner and Harper James. Together they are focused on creating music that pulls together “storytelling, sticky melodies, and minimalist pop productions built on acoustic instruments and electronic sounds”. Adorably, they call this sound “808s and telecasters”, and with that, they have won my heart, because OF COURSE. I only wish I had thought of that first so it could be the strap-line for BlackPlastic.co.uk.

Having already achieved a #2 hit on the Spotify Global Viral Chart with their debut single, Three Thirty, Eighty Ninety can count Taylor Swift as a fan after the superstar added their single Your Favorite Song to her Spotify playlist, Songs Taylor Loves.

New single Better As Friends is about wanting to stay connected to someone you once loved but knowing that it might be less painful in the long run to just let them go. The song revolves around a killer chorus:

“How the fuck do we get so mixed up and here we are running in circles again. But once you tell someone that you know they’re the one and you love them, can you really be better as friends?”

The hushed falsetto vocal and production come together on Better As Friends to make something that takes my breath away… the way it opens with gentle keys underpinned with warm, bass and flecks of that Telecaster. There are little touches that really lift the production work here. The warm feel of the live bass sound, the way the filters apply to the make the bridge feel like it is lifting off, a tiny squeak hidden beneath the chorus that sounds like fingers sliding up the fretboard. Better As Friends introduces these various elements slowly, a little piece at a time, and the result builds just the way nagging emotions do… Before you know it, you’re lost in your feelings and you know they are the one.