TRACK OF THE WEEK

Abra

Crybaby

Abra is from New York via Tooting. Born to missionaries working in Kerala, she went around the world singing church songs before getting signed to Atlanta’s outsider hip-hop label Awful Records. It’s this sense of kinetic displacement, a constant, vibrating movement, that gives Crybaby such a powerfully eerie feeling; a sweet, funky freestyle that sounds like it’s on a record player falling down a deep pit. It’s a track that could be played at the funeral of R&B itself, a celebratory yet sad fading spirit. Too much?

Bosco Rodgers

Beach! Beach! Beach!

If you ever wondered whether it was humanly possible to create a song only using cliches, then wonder no more, as Bosco Rodgers have an answer for you: it’s a yes. Beach! Beach! Beach! is no doubt meant to be tongue in cheek, but the tongue just burst through the soft dermis straight through the other side with its hackneyed drive-in lyrics (“A summer kiss is for a ride in your limo”), boring surf-rock shlock and irritating, feckless, sea-spray vocals. More Skegness than San Fran Bay.

Angelic Milk

Rebel Black

Russia’s Angelic Milk (usually written in all lower case but we can’t allow that millennial gubbins in here now, can we?) sound as if jolly and twee mid-2000s Scandi-pop girl band Those Dancing Days have witnessed a puppy being threshed by a lawn mower, then stocked up on Xanax and penned a drowsy nightmare about it. Or, to put it another way, this is a depressing bit of modern grunge, gloriously muddy and slippery, and filled with the sadness of dejected teens who’ve been banned for a day from Snapchat. Great.

Nimmo

My Only Friend

Remember when Formation came out and everyone thought it was sick and everyone else who thought it kinda sucked was told that it “wasn’t for them”? That’s how I feel about Nimmo. To me it’s a band who look rough and ready and “hip” but seem to make fairly uninspiring, average club night music. Can the lovely chorus save it? No.

Honne And Izzy Bizu

Someone That Loves You

Scratch that, I was too hard on Nimmo. This song, by electronic soul duo Honne, featuring perennial Radio 1 support act Izzy Bizu, is the purest definition of bland. It’s a lazy, wet, sad piece of work that barely contains any actual music, just some sleepy chords, and a duet from two singers who sound as if they’d rather be on a night bus. Well let me tell you something, Honne and Bizu: I don’t care much for you either! Not one bit!