Te Kaahu - Te Kaahu O Rangi

Aotearoa artist Theia delivers Te Kaahu O Rangi as Te Kaahu, a project that provides the listener with instant goosebumps and connection to the land. TKOR is a collection of nine waiata that are deeply mellow and feel like the perfect companion for time in nature as Te Kaahu shares jams from her whanau. The jams range from light and fluffy to painful, though even in the pain there is still an uplifting energy to be felt when shared through waiata. However and for whatever reason you want to raise your mana and embrace Aotearoa, TKOR serves as a guide. Listening to TKOR will touch your soul and at a very basic level it is a lovely teacher of all things Aotearoa. Having an artist like Te Kaahu channel this energy and share her creativity in this way feels like the best way to enter the new year, embracing the Matariki shadow.

Angel Olsen - Big Time

Shooting immediately up into the realms of Album of the Year contenders is the latest effort by Angel Olsen. Having worn several genre hats over the years, from gentle acoustic burners to extravagant art-pop concoctions... Big Time finds Olsen in a territory that draws from a little of all of that whilst mixing it together in a sort of Laurel Canyon circa-1969 trippy country sculpture. Have to imagine there was plenty of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gene Clark, Byrds, Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris, etc. on the playlist whilst writing and recording this sucker. We’re talking pedal steel and organs, fuzzed out electric guitar, shuffling drums, not to mention Olsen’s always remarkable vocals. All sorts of emotional territory. Beautiful and devastating. Stacked with lyrical bars. It’s ambitious and it delivers on that ambition. Literal bangers from track one through ten and there’s nothing else could be written which wouldn’t waste your precious time to read when you could be listening to this album instead.

Goose - Dripfield

The new darlings of the jam band scene, emerging over lockdown with a flurry of virtual concerts leading into hype for actual concerts and with the world craving the type of free expression that you get from longform improvised heady jams... well, here ya go. This is Goose’s third studio album but the first made since their breakthrough and the first that feels like an actual set of songs rather than just sketches to stretch out in live gigs. How’s that go for them? Decently. The first couple tracks, Borne and Hungersite, are really good. As is closer 726 although the album loses momentum through the middle. Goose are more Phish than Grateful Dead, lacking the Dead’s groundedness. Bit more synthy, bit more of an R&B and dub influence, 2010s indie rock too, and they’re not particularly psychedelic. But there’s still a lot to like here and when the lads let loose they can really play.

Te KuraHuia - UHA

There is nothing like an artist owning their creativity to the fullest and Te KuraHuia's new project 'Uha' serves as the best example from Aotearoa of this. Uha only consists of three jams with Poia and BMW tapping into a funky groove of Aotearoa music that will force you to tap along. Te Ira Wahine is slower and feels more like a journey within that is equally as captivating as the other jams. Uha comes together as a monumental project. Rooted in upbeat, powerful funk there is plenty to learn from just three tunes (plus a Te Ira Wahine radio edit). This is mandatory listening for any Aotearoa music fan and a low key takeaway is that instead of complaining, one can always impact matters more by embracing their own mana.

Joan Shelley – The Spur

Joan Shelley makes music that evokes the morning dew dripping from a flower petal. She makes music that evokes a river current trickling over rocks and broken branches. She makes music that evokes the glint of reflected sunrise in your eye. Beautiful, soul-cleansing music. Her latest is borne of those small moments of perfection and more, written after a pandemic-enforced break from touring led to a deepening connection to the land, to home, and to family. Very much in the folk tradition. Sparse arrangements mostly built around finger-picked acoustic guitar as well as a couple piano tunes. Lyrics that feel like they’ll take dozens of listens to get a grasp upon. Very reminiscent of Gillian Welch/David Rawlings in places (which is a good place to be). Such a sweet and profound listen.

Tedeschi Trucks Band – I Am The Moon: I. Crescent

Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks are a true power couple in that rock/soul/blues/country/jazz crossroads (shout out to the rest of their top notch 12-piece band too) though there’s a case to be made that they’ve never quite captured their live lightning on a record. This could be the one that changes that. A massively ambitious project: a quadruple album released in its four parts taking inspiration from the lessons of pandemic life as well as the ancient Persian poem Layla and Manjun (aka a bit of everything). I Am The Moon is deliberately huge in both scope and scale. We’re talking 24 tracks and more than two hours long, with one quarter released per month, touching upon the universal themes of the soul. Crescent is the first of those quarters and it’s powerful stuff. Very spiritual. Very groovy. Lots of Trucks’ killer slide guitar. Only five tracks but they’re all at least five mins long and cover all sorts of musical territory. The whole band is in top form, the songs are first-class. And this is only the first quarter of the album.

Drive-By Truckers – Welcome 2 Club XIII

What to expect from the greatest Southern Rock band of all-time with their fourteenth studio album? More pure class, pretty much. Their last couple albums were a bit below par but American Band (2016) and English Oceans (2014) before them were superb and displayed the workings of a band of craftsmen that were going to be able to age gracefully. W2CXIII features a lot of songs about reminisces. Lots of story-telling compared to the more politically driven last few (though, again, American Band was great and Ramon Casiano is an all-timer message song), putting the Truckers in that familiar territory of their early-00s prime. Given that DBT always had a world-weary sheen to them, there are definitely tunes here that could fit alongside some of the classics. The title track is a great stomper. Forged In Hell And Heaven Sent is great. As is Billy Ringo In The Dark. Couple lovely Cooley efforts (Maria’s Awful Disclosures & Every Single Storied Flameout). The Driver is so atmospheric it makes you instinctively reach for the high beams. Yep, the Truckers have still got that old magic.

Logic - Vinyl Days

On 'Vinyl Days', Logic delivers the raw elements of hip-hop that make it so enticing. Logic's career started in this pocket with his 'Young Sinatra' series and he took this into a story-telling zone for his first two albums 'Under Pressure' and 'The Incredible True Story' before exploring more sounds, styles, and even career options. On VD, Logic relies on samples and an overall boom-bappy sound from his own production as well as the reliable 6ix. The production provides the listener with comfort while also serving as the best platform for Logic to reflect on his career, weave rhymes together, and explore a bunch of guest features.

Apart from all the guest appearances on skits, Logic calls upon Action Bronson, Russ, Wiz Khalifa, AZ, Blue & Exile and The Game to drop verses. Logic embraces the style of each artist and there is enough variety in these features, as well as the overall 30-track project for each jam to be enjoyed. The 30 tracks include a bunch of skits, or call ins from various folk and after listening to VD from front to back in a first up listen, you can them pick your favourite tracks to zone in on. Treat VD as a steady, reliable project that will keep you grooving without having to ponder too much.

Melody’s Echo Chamber – Emotional Eternal

Third full length album from the psych pop project of French songwriter Melody Prochet and what immediately stands out is just how overflowing with peace and happiness it seems to be. The previous MEC records also had a light and breezy atmosphere to them but not in such a consistently sunny way. It’s been a tough few years for Prochet, who almost died in a serious accident in 2017, so it’s heartwarming to hear here in such a vibrant place. There are still the huge swelling arrangements that you’d expect, with moments that’ll pick you up and carry you along on the groove. Pyramids in the Clouds is a proper psych banger. Personal Message is probably the pick of the bunch. Where The Water Clears The Illusion goes good too. Heaps of fun. Overall Emotional Eternal is perhaps a little too light in places compared to her outstanding first two albums... but it’s not far off. Heaps of relisten value too which is great because it’s only gonna slap harder when the sunny months re-emerge later in the year.

Mary Lattimore & Paul Sukeena – West Kensington

Mary Lattimore plays harp and synthesizers. Paul Sukeena plays electric guitar, mellotron, and Old Style rubber bridge. The result is an extremely trippy space odyssey of an album that by its own admission is part Brian Eno and part Alice Coltrane. You’d better believe that there is a whole lot of wobbly reverb and droning electrics and Lattimore’s usually gentle harp being plucked in a context that suddenly sounds kinda menacing. The imagination doesn’t require much stretching before you can ponder this album as the soundtrack to a David Lynch movie... although the vibe does get brighter as it goes along. Probably worth mentioning that album was written by the pair during their isolation things thanks to the cosmic convenience of just so happening to be neighbours. They recorded it in Lattimore’s living room. Timely friendship. Coincidental geography. Ambient fever dreams. Bless.

Conway The Machine – What Has Been Blessed Cannot Be Cursed

Mate, it’s new Griselda. You know what to expect. Particularly from Conway who (like his cricketing namesake) very rarely serves up anything less than high calibre, smacking boundaries all around the park. The Machine has been busy this year already releasing the solo record God Don’t Make Mistakes, a mixtape Greetings Earthings, a collab with Trillmatic Goods called Organixed Grime 2... and now here’s his third collaboration album with producer Big Ghost LTD. The first was No One Mourns The Wicked (2020), the second was If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed (2021), and now What Has Been Blessed Cannot Be Cursed (2022). The album titles alone give you a great indication. Conway does what he does on WHBBCBC, serving up hard bars over tight beats though to be honest what tips this one into territory worth singling out amidst a crowded discography is the production. Ghost knows his way around a mean sample and this one is stacked with old golden blues and soul sounds that add so much depth to the undercurrent themes of the record. Definitely get amongst.

Emma Ruth Rundle – EG2: Dowsing Voice

One more to highlight this month and it’s a very weird release from ERR. This is not the goth tinged drone-rock that Rundle’s most known for, nor does it count as another of her explorations into metal. Instead it’s a sequel to her 2014 release Electric Guitar One. That one was an instrumental guitar exploration with woozy textures built around extended improvisations. This one is the same... except even more bonkers as we’re dealing with shorter tracks with druid-influenced folk titles that kinda sounds like an alternate soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings trilogy... except if it was framed by the orcs instead of hobbits and elves. Imagine if WB Yeats had been a massive fan of the band Earth, that’s what we’re talking about here. The way that ERR uses her voice as another instrument is truly remarkable. It’s a shame it’s not a film soundtrack because if it was that film would be an instant cult classic.

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