Four star-frenzy: These new albums are so close to perfect

Chris Potter, Alive with Ghosts Today
★★★★

This is, to date, Chris Potter’s magnum opus. Until now I’d thought the saxophonist’s most important artistic statements came when he was in the late Paul Motian’s band. But with Alive with Ghosts Today he ratchets up the ambition, creating a suite memorialising the 1859 attempt by John Brown and a biracial group of 21 men to take over the US Arsenal in Virginia, intent upon freeing all slaves. It didn’t go well. All but five of Brown’s gang were shot in the raid or executed, the latter being his own fate.

The title track conjures its ghosts with a slow parade of hair-raising harmonies before Osawatomie Brown celebrates the nickname Brown won for leading anti-slavery forces in a clash in Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1856. Potter plays driving tenor over a muscular, medium-tempo backbeat groove, and then an ensemble passage beckons Bill Frisell’s spangly guitar, which stays suspended in a more muted mood, contrasting with Potter’s vigour.

The real interest starts with The Heavens in Scarlet, a quote from the ultra-religious Brown. Now the full imagination of Potter’s composing and arranging emerges as he deploys his distinctive ensemble, in which Frisell’s guitar is joined by clarinet (Rane Moore), trombone (Zekkereya El-Magharbel) and violin (Sara Caswell), in addition to Burniss Travis’ bass and Nate Smith’s drums. Potter unleashes the burnished glory of his tenor’s tone over the chunky rhythm section, prior to Frisell building a Milky Way of wafting lines and chords.

Sister Annie is for Brown’s 15-year-old daughter, who was complicit in the raid’s preparations and survived to be 82. Over a bouncy feel, Frisell solos with his singular combination of naivety and knowing, before Potter’s tenor storms across Smith’s rhythmic crosscurrents. This World Would Have No Charms for Me, a lament in 3/4, has the violin and horns coiling around each, leading to an exquisite feature from Caswell, another understated gem from Frisell, and then a blast of anguish from Potter.

Brown referred to the slave states as “Africa”, hence Into Africa, with its bristling solo introduction from Potter and subsequent rhythmic and melodic evocation of the Dark Continent, with Potter hugely energised amid jutting ensemble commentary and Frisell at his most enigmatic. Mine Eyes are the opening words of Battle Hymn of the Republic, which, of course, shares its melody with John Brown’s Body. Potter does not draw on the tune, rather creating a piece of constant agitation with darting little ensemble lines intruding upon Frisell’s introverted contribution, while the saxophonist is at his most lacerating, his sound growing in proportion.

It all drops away to something like a prayer from the trombone over Smith’s skittering drumming, before the ensemble swells to a crescendo and Potter closes the album by revisiting the title track in looser fashion, with Frisell stepping out of his own shadow to make some fierce little asides. The recording quality is sumptuous. John Shand

Iceage, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter
★★★★

Iceage perform another nimble sidestep with For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, their first studio album in five years. The Danish art rockers have been outrunning expectations since their teens, confounding fans of their 2011 debut by adding splashes of Americana, classic rock and anthemic Britpop to their original rampaging post-punk.

This time, though, they’ve stripped back again. For Love of Grace was written and recorded quickly in a house in rural Sweden, with little studio trickery. The band have shed some of their old solemnity, turning out songs that are lean, frenetic and, dare I say, fun.

They have a newfound velocity – you can practically smell the burning rubber after The Weak, with its rolling drums and Chuck Berry riff – and levity. There’s ebullient dance-punk (Match Stick Girl); chirpy, Springsteen-style choruses (Mother of Pearl) and jangle pop with a melodica outro (1835). But the Danes can still summon a sense of danger.

Their signature seductive tempo changes remain, along with passages of grinding, implosive noise. And thematically they still seesaw between violence and spiritual abandon. Hip-swinging single Star balances sparkling guitars with delirious, blood-spattered lyrics. No Fear – the most uplifting track, with its tantalising, too brief chorus – offers images of halos and “a blessed shore”. This is Iceage’s brightest, most cohesive album to date: the assured sound of a band working entirely on its own terms. Annie Toller

South Summit, Run It Back
★★★★

The Lena is a shipwreck off the coast of Western Australia. It attracts divers from around the world, endlessly fascinating and eminently accessible. On the surface it’s beautiful: inviting and full of life, exhilarating but safe. As you go deeper, though, every layer uncovers something new and unexpected, a darkness giving way to hidden delights.

It’s an experience reflective of another Western Australian gem: the ever-evolving sound of South Summit. Early singles like River Days and Runaway introduced a fresh coastal rock band with a distinct reggae influence, Ocean Alley by way of the Caribbean. Yet South Summit have never been stagnant. And on their second record Run It Back they have produced an experimental and complex groove, laced with the vibrant energy and compelling hooks that endeared them in the first place.

Waiting All Night and More Life are classic South Summit, life-affirming, calypso-tinged rhythms and gorgeous refrains. We Are is destined to become a live-show crowd-pleaser, a unifying banger with a punchy hook and infectious bounce. But departures abound: Heartless is aching, emotionally resonant and cathartic, heartbreaking but hopeful.

And some of the album’s best and most exciting moments come when they veer into hip-hop territory. Ando Boi is an enthralling two-minute current of velvety bars and soulful choruses, Call of the Empire has a late-’90s throwback vibe, while How We Live is a defiant machine gun. The shipwreck has been dredged. Time for everyone to discover its untold wonders. Tom W. Clarke

Kuzco, Bound to Be
★★★★

Much has been made of the resurgence of turn-of-the-millennium “indie sleaze” but seemingly less influence has been drawn from the refined disco- and boogie-inspired house music reconstructions coming out of New York City at the same time. On Bound to Be, Kuzco – the Naarm-based synth player, producer and DJ – stops by groove-based dance music’s less frequently revisited neighbourhoods.

Written and recorded in a three-day blast in London, one can hear a trans-Atlantic exchange on each of the EPs four tracks and accompanying remixes. The EP opens with What Could Happen, a low-key funk track mixing pops of cruisy Latin freestyle with Kuzco’s vocals that channels UK street soul. The influence of the NYC labels Balihu and Environ loom large. Be Loved echoes the latter’s revered duo Metro Area. The EP escalates with each track: HA HA HA’s tight drum production winks at Chicago footwork, and Waaalk takes it straight to the club.

The internet has flattened time and place to such an extent that new music too often feels like facsimiles of existing genres that want to exist in epochs other than their own. Rare is the artist like Kuzco who manages to take those influences and fuse them into something fresh. Nick Buckley

Kurt Vile, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me
★★★★

Call it dad-rock, unc-rock or whatever – even 10 albums deep into his guitar-rambling career, indie hero Kurt Vile can still churn out the sort of slacker aphorisms you can build an identity around. “Watch me move so slow because I know how to stroll,” he sings on his new album’s appropriately sprawling centrepiece 99th Song, and your inherent laziness immediately takes on a philosophical sheen. Even the way Vile mumbles, “I don’t know”, on 99BPM – somewhere between “eye-onno” and “I-woah” – carries depths of carefree enlightenment.

The whole album finds Vile, now a 46-year-old father of two daughters, casually revelling in the creative process – its joys, its frustrations, the mere fact he gets to do it – and earnestly espousing the responsibility he feels to his work, especially on the affecting Chance to Bleed.

I first heard it as a motivational song, urging himself out of writer’s block or apathetic malaise by placing himself on a continuum with “that old-time, lo-fi, DIY, rock’n’roll” that first emboldened him – but then I realised I misheard the lyric where he sings, “Things these days don’t seem to be connecting”, as “connected”. My interpretation is better, and I think Kurt Vile would agree. Robert Moran

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.