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Clockwise from top left: Pharoah Sanders (Photo: Dimitri Hakke), Jazmine Sullivan (Photo: Getty Images), Julien Baker (Photo: Getty Images), Mogwai (Photo: Getty Images), Olivia Rodrigo (Getty Images)
Graphic: Natalie Peeples
Whoever said artists should have to suffer for their art? Presumably, someone who never had to suffer much. Musicians, like writers, are still too often tagged with this bizarre assumption that creating their art should require an arduous grappling with their muse, borne of pain or sadness. Unfortunately, the past six months have brought with them a surfeit of suffering; it’s still hard to talk about almost anything without referring back at some point to the hardships many of us have dealt with this past year, courtesy of COVID-19. But thanks to a miracle of medical science and the vast majority of people sane enough to understand the need to get vaccinated, things are feeling a lot more hopeful than they have been in a long time.
Exclaim! s 31 Best Albums of 2021 So Far
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Loud And Quiet
The best new LPs of May 2021
Sunshine might be a distant memory, but live music is back, so why do you want to go outside? As you start to browse the gig listings with a little more confidence, touch wood, here are some names to look out for. Not quite a baker’s dozen (those of us ever in the sourdough stage of lockdown are surely out of it now), here are our favourite twelve albums from May 2021.
th time lucky in Lambchop’s sonic explorations; an experimental triumph for Kurt Wagner and company.
L&Q says: “Here is a restless, dense, audacious and genuinely experimental record that, despite sounding not quite like anything the band have made before, nonetheless retains their personality and wit, retooled for another reinvention.”
Published May 03, 2021
9
Death hangs heavy in the mind of rising Virginia rapper McKinley Dixon. In 2018, his best friend was killed, which Dixon describes as feeling like brass knuckles with shards of broken home to the dome, on make a poet Black, the lead single from
For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her.
The weight of this death can be felt from the first moments of opening track Chain Sooo Heavy. Dixon is a wordsmith in full command of both narrative and atmosphere, and while this free-jazz track threatens to be disorderly with drums shuffling in every which way and loose-cannon saxophone startling at every corner, Dixon checks the unkempt compositions with measured and precise raps about the commodification of Black trauma.
Modern boredom has come for us all in different ways over the past year. For Virginia rapper McKinley Dixon, it’s meant alternating resources to Black and trans fundraisers across his social media with discussions about which cartoon dogs or early-to-mid-2000s pop punk bands he could beat in a fight: Brokencyde, A Day To Remember, three iterations of Dance Gavin Dance. He would lose to Babymetal, but wouldn’t we all?
His label debut,
For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her, is caught in the same, very human, crossfire, where humour and braggadocio are tools for contemplation, learning how to grieve, process and communicate Black trauma. It’s an album deliciously characterised by its singles. ‘Chain Sooo Heavy’ is a vitrine for McKinley Dixon the rapper, coolly directing the live arrangement that swells with theatrical chaos of Kamasi Washington’s
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