Check out this weeks ‘Vinyl Five for Monday 27/04/2015’, The essential vinyl you should own this week, carefully selected by Kenny Murdock from Belfast’s best vinyl record store ‘Sick Records, Belfast‘.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST (Death Waltz)

The soundtrack to Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian vampire movie sits a little uncomfortably on the Death Waltz roster because, unlike the majority of their previous releases, it’s not an original score. Instead it draws together a superb collection of existing Eastern pop songs which enhance, what is, an excellent movie and hold together surprisingly well as a separate musical project. We get the Morricone-influenced “Yarom Bia” by Kiosk, the bombastic “Death” by White Lies and the infectious electro-pop of “Dancing Girls” by Farah but you’ve got to see the movie to understand the importance of each individual track in the context of the movie. Another Death Waltz victory.

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Gnod – Infinity Machines (Rocket)

The recent re-press of Gnod’s collaboration with White Hills mixed sprawling space-rock jams with slow, repetitive pulses of drone and a more pedestrian Psychedelia. It was epic but might lead unsuspecting fans to this album under false pretences. Infinity Machines is not Psych. It’s a mix of free-jazz, dark post-punk and huge, lumbering modern beats rotated and repeated in an unsettling vortex, de-void of light or escape. Over six sides of vinyl, Infinity Machines is, at times, un-settling but becomes less-so with each repeated listen. In a year dominated by drone, this is an un-doubted highlight.

Robert Aiki, Ariel Kalma & Aubrey Lowe – FRKWYS Volume 12 /We Know Each Other Somehow (RVNG Intl.)

After last year’s Kalma retrospective (An Evolutionary Music) on the same label, interest in this twelfth volume of the FRKWYS series couldn’t be greater. Here he combines with Aubrey Lowe (Lichens / Om) and Robert Aiki for a fantastic new-age album of modular drone, jazz saxophone and field recordings based on Kalma’s travels through Asia and the Middle East and spiritual studies at the Arica school (whose consciousness expanding philosophies inspired Alejandro Jodoworky). Voyaging along parallel paths until now, We Know Each Other Somehow shows these artists summoning another world in an otherworldly part of the planet, merging the collective voice with their own.

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Blur – The Magic Whip (Parlophone)

Let’s be clear, I wanted to hate this album. The Magic Whip wasn’t planned. It happened by accident after several cancellations on the last “Greatest Hits” tour. It sounds like Blur in that each disparate element is present and familiar but here they all (with perhaps the exception of Alex James’ rudimentary bass) contribute to a freshness that I just didn’t anticipate. Opener “Lonesome Street” (mis)leads the listener into thinking that this is an exercise in cashing-in on a jaunty cock-er-nee sound which is over two decades old but the throbbing dub of “Go Out” sounds more like Albarn’s work with The Good, The Bad & The Queen. Overall this is a solid return with a few sequencing issues but given time to collaborate properly, this is proof that there’s life in this partnership.

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Nils Frahm – Solo (Erased Tapes)

Solo, Nils Frahm’s project for Piano Day (8th April), is a stunning, minimal celebration of his favoured instrument. Unlike last year’s Spaces, Frahm eschews fleshing out each piece with modular synth drones, preferring to let each note breathe through the elongated intervals in a beautiful, stark suite of modern classical compositions. For fans of Max Richter or Philip Glass. (Album Of The Month for April 2015)

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Belfast, United Kingdom
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