Record Time is Paste’s monthly column that takes a glimpse into the wide array of new vinyl releases that are currently flooding record stores around the world. Rather than run down every fresh bit of wax in the marketplace, we’ll home in on special editions, reissues and unusual titles that come across our desk with an interest in discussing both the music and how it is pressed and presented. This month’s edition includes some audiophile-minded jazz reissues, a collection of folk-punk classics and a variety of new sounds from around the world.
The Chills: Scatterbrain (Fire)
The existence of the third new album from The Chills in six years feels like a quiet miracle. Band leader Martin Phillipps has been through a few circles of hell, owing to drug issues and a Hepatitis C diagnosis. Back on solid ground, he’s writing perhaps his best work yet, and, on the recently released Scatterbrain, using his lyrics to take stock of the years he has left. The fog of mortality hangs over each song, but it never feels enveloping or blinding. Even when the music becomes downcast, Phillipps’ viewpoint is one of quiet acceptance of his eventual date with the unknown. The highlights of the album arrive when he applies those lyrics to upbeat and punchy tunes, like the swirling “Worlds Within Worlds” and the triumphal closer “Walls Beyond Abandon.” It brings a delightful dissonance to the work that calls back to The Chills’ amazing ’80s run. Phillipps may be thinking about life’s end, but it’s work like Scatterbrain that will make him immortal.
The Gil Evans Orchestra: Out of the Cool/Ray Charles: Genius + Soul = Jazz (Impulse/Verve/UMe)
After spending much of last year giving fresh life to titles from Verve’s catalog, audio company Acoustic Sounds turns its attention to another great jazz label. Through the rest of 2021, UMe will re-release some gems from Impulse Records’ 60-year history, using the original master tapes and paying meticulous attention to the music. The first reissues in this series—The Gil Evans Orchestra’s Out of the Cool and Ray Charles’ Genius Soul = Jazz—were part of the first four albums Impulse released back in 1961 and set the template for the next six decades of the label’s output. The music on both albums was already lush and exciting, applying a big band brashness to cool jazz and gritty blues. These remasters amplify those qualities to a sometimes overwhelming degree. Listening to Genius Soul was near exhausting as every last detail is brought to the surface. The nasty tone of Charles’ electric organ. Freddy Green’s steadily bouncing guitar. Every individual brass and woodwind instrument. Every player is right there, jockeying for your attention. Evans’ album is less staggering but that’s only because the music cushions rather than cajoles. The five compositions, and Evans’ arrangements of them, are as crisp as a well-tailored suit and have the devilish allure of a gangster’s moll in a film noir classic.
Gruff Rhys: Seeking New Gods (Rough Trade)
Super Furry Animals leader Gruff Rhys wrote his latest, and arguably his best, solo album thinking on a macro scale. Using Mount Paektu, an active volcano in North Korea, as his guide, he crafted a suite of songs wrestling with the human race’s tiny place on both the planet we call home and within the universe as a whole. I’ll give you a minute to recover from the existential shudder that idea may have set off within you. And when you do, encourage you to track down a copy of this marvelous album. Rhys and his backing band, including former Flaming Lips member Kliph Scurlock on drums and the secret star of this show Steve Black on bass guitar, fearlessly dance on the lip of this particular volcano with bouncy tunes that roll and churn like the members of Argent covering The Zombies’ Odessey & Oracle. For Rhys’s part, he sounds like he’s been listening to the ancient myths surrounding this peak and finding within them deep connections to our modern biases and desires. All of us, in our small and large ways, are seeing some kind of explanation for how we got here and what comes next after we breathe our last. Rhys makes that search feel exciting and downright hopeful.
