The New Cue #390 June 21: Fontaines D.C., The Japanese House, Burial, The Mary Wallopers, Joe Goddard, Mavis Staples, Moon Balloon, Jamie xx, Liela Moss, Kiiōtō

"I like dubstep"

Hello,

Welcome to your weekly Recommender fix. Here is what is going to happen: you’re going to get this annoying intro bit out the way nice and quickly, this bit is just the unamusing-bouche before we get to main service, then you’re going to scroll until you can scroll no more, basking in the new music recommendations and high-fiving the air about the mind-blower selections that are included below courtesy of Joe Goddard and Kiiōtō, after which you might well run into the street and clasp a stranger and say “do you subscribe to The New Cue because you should because it only costs £5 a month and it’s actually improved my life and I even smell better. Oh and they do a free playlist every week too, Oh Christ, it’s hovering below me right now!”:

“But they’re seriously bloody good blokes yah because they do it for the Apple Music crew too”

And then you can march into the weekend feeling good, feeling great, knowing another edition of your favourite music Substack letter will be landing on Monday morning. We’ll see you then for a chinwag with ex-Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks.

Enjoy the edition,

Ted, Niall and Chris

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An Album To Blow Your Mind #1

Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard digs Alice Coltrane spiritual jazz synth jams.

You might know DJ/producer Joe Goddard as a founding member of Hot Chip. You know, these guys:

Or you might know him as one half of the equally brilliant 2 Bears alongside fellow DJ Raf Rundell:

Or you might know Joe entirely in his own right as a purveyor of sparkling, melancholy dance pop like Follow You, a track he put out earlier this week:

When he’s not doing all that, Joe bloody loves listening to all sorts of music, and here he’s picked out a compilation of spiritual jazz high priestess Alice Coltrane for your listening pleasure. Take it away, Joe…

Alice Coltrane

The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (2017)

“It’s a collection released on [US label] Luaka Bop a few years ago of Alice Coltrane’s music in the ‘80s and ‘90s as she became more involved in religious spiritualism. This was originally released on cassette tape, with just a few hundred copies made. Luaka Bop made a collection of ten tracks from four albums where Alice is singing, chanting and mostly playing an OB8 synthesizer, a synthesizer that we’ve been using in the studio. It’s a great mid-80s Oberheim synth with rich pads and string sounds, creating a deep meditative sound which is reflected in this album: long tracks, Balearic, slow tempos, quite deep, quite repetitive, vocal mantras - a large group of people singing and chanting together. It’s very beautiful and dedicated to God, without any ego. It’s a great record to put on a Sunday, it’s a relaxing meditative experience which is quite trance-inducing. I feel some of these tracks could be reedited into quite deep dance-floor moments as well, they almost sound like deep house or techno at times. There are very long, slowly-evolving arrangements, featuring a lot of hand claps and hand percussion. Very simple but very deep music that I find very calming and soothing. It’s a really wonderful record.”

Joe Goddard’s new album Harmonics is out July 12 on Domino.

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Recommender

Niall Doherty

I still haven’t quite got my admittedly sartorially-ignorant head around the new look that Fontaines D.C. are sporting, a sort of cyberpunk-meets-The Offspring-meets an incoming gel sponsorship get-up, but I feel a lot more at ease with it since a mate of mine saw frontman Grian Chatten on the tube the other week and he was in full nu-Fontaines garb, spiky hair, wraparound shades, puke-green shorts. Grian is fully committed and I respect that. He was also eating a McFlurry, flavour unconfirmed. There’s has been no such deliberating over the Dublin quintet’s new music. Their forthcoming fourth album Romance, which I am lucky enough to have a copy of, is mind-blowingly brilliant but I will harp on about that more nearer the time – it’s out in August.