Music I Liked – Digawolf, Saba Alizadeh, Funereal Presence, Shana Cleveland, Ahmed Ag Kaedy, Hand Habits

Every now and then there a theme emerges naturally. In this week’s roundup, I’ve got a lot of hybridization. Specifically, I found a lot of contemporary approaches to traditional styles, but there’s at least one side project in the list. This week I liked Digawolf, Saba Alizadeh, Funereal Presence, Shana Cleveland and the Sandcastles, Ahmed Ag Kaedy, and Hand Habits.

Digawolf

Digawolf‘s album Yellowstone, featured a while back on the Bandcamp Daily, has a lot in common sonically with Tom Waits, and sometimes a little with Springsteen. Thematically it echoes Louise Erdrich and Joseph Boyden, whose novels center indigenous people of the far north. Digawolf sings in English and in Tlicho, an endangered native language I’ve never heard before. To my uneducated ear, Tlicho sounds kind of like French, which is an unexpected palette to add to blues rock, but it works perfectly on Yellowstone. Maybe it’s because the sonic base is blues rock, Digawolf’s music feels a little more accessible than the other Native American band I’ve written about here, Khuu.eex’.

Saba Alizadeh

The debut album by Saba Alizadeh features a kind of fiddle music. Normally, you’d have me at “fiddle,” but like the language Tlicho, I’ve never heard of Iranian spiked fiddle before and had to listen more closely to see what I thought. I recently featured an Iranian band, Integral Rigor, that pulls Persian melodies into black metal compositions. Scattered Memories is not that kind of hybrid. It does include modern production and electronic elements, but the dominant flavor is traditional Iranian music. It’s haunting and strange and I like it.

Funereal Presence

All the blogs are calling the album Achatius by Funereal Presence black metal. But to me, it’s much more varied and interesting than most black metal. There is even some well-placed cow bell. Black metal fans get really worked up about trveness. Personally, I like my black metal false. I think Satan would like it that way. He’s never been much of a dogmatist.

Shana Cleveland and the Sandcastles

I’m not a huge fan of KEXP favorites La Luz, but this side project from Shana Cleveland with the Sandcastles really hooked my ears. I meant to give one track a single listen. Then I couldn’t turn it off. Oh Man, Cover the Ground came out a few years ago, but I stumbled onto it in the press build up to a new solo album from Cleveland.

Ahmed Ag Kaedy

Ever since I heard Tinariwen live at Pickathon, I can’t get enough desert blues. Ahmed Ag Kaedy sings in Tuareg, but his guitar work, especially on “Adounia,” the track that opens Alkaline Kidal, is pure Delta blues. Someday I will study the connection between the two styles more closely. In the meantime, I’m going to listen to a lot of this.

Hand Habits

I don’t remember where I first heard placeholder by Hand Habits, but I liked it enough to make a note of it. At the time, I must have had some reservations about the music, because my note instructed me to listen to it again before writing about it. This week I did, and I found it to be lovely, haunting music.