Albums of the week: Basic, Kelsey Lu, La Sécurité, Gary Bartz and Your Brother’s Keeper

Basic

Basic

(No Quarter)

The improvisational underground can seem a theoretical and forbidding place. But this second album from the Chicago trio Basic is sinuous and inviting, rooted in gnarly guitar rock and non-western forms.

Named not for the early computer programming language but for a 1984 album made by notable members of Lou Reed’s backing band, Basic trade in mercurial guitar lines, drones and polyrhythms. Part-improvised, the trio’s kaleidoscopic instrumentals harness electric guitars to programmed and live percussion, some made on self-fashioned electronic instruments. 

Basic’s prime mover is Chris Forsyth, veteran of the guitar underground, collaborating here with jazz polymath Mikel Patrick Avery from the wonderful Natural Information Society, and Doug McCombs, most famous from the Chicago post-rock heroes Tortoise, on baritone guitar. There’s more than an echo of the latter band on the penultimate track, It Ignites. Forsyth’s rock guitar skronk is rampant on Brutalist With Filigree, while recurring motifs and a sense of playfulness light up Loose Canon. They add up to a nimble record that shrugs off genre and seems to refresh with every play. Kitty Empire

So Help Me God

Kelsey Lu

(Dirty Hit)

Seven years after their debut, the US singer, songwriter, cellist and producer Kelsey Lu’s second album takes what they are known for – cathartic songs that marry cinematic chamber-pop with meditative experimentalism – and amps it up.

Lu works with co-producers Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman to sublime effect. Lead single Running To Pain finds their expansive vocals gleaming through lush clouds of synth. Antonoff’s grandiose 1980s inflections are apparent elsewhere on Cutting Off The Head Of A Ghost, on which Lu is backed by an Italian children’s choir. 

There are welcome guest flourishes – Kim Gordon, Kamasi Washington, the violinist Lady Jess, plus a gorgeous Sampha vocal – but Lu is very much centre-stage. Their cello sounds as though it is grieving during the opening of American Sonnet (based on a Wanda Coleman poem), before an anxious pulsing bleeds into the next track, 852.

Lu has said this is a record about reckoning rather than healing, and certainly there are times where their voice seems boundless over ruminative instrumentals, feelings left to float unresolved. The album is not quite of this world, and Lu’s best work here remains dreamlike. Tara Joshi

Bingo!

La Sécurité

(Bella Union)

Another band to spring from Montreal’s endlessly fertile music scene, La Sécurité tick all the right art-rock boxes. Their cross-pollinated blend of herky-jerky 70s no wave, electroclash and post-punk has unimpeachable reference points: Le Tigre, Liliput, Devo, Chicks on Speed. Their bilingual French-English lyrics on the one hand catalogue the banality of everyday consumerism (Ketchup, Snack City) and on the other address mental-health issues (Power Snoozer) or attempt to destigmatise sex workers (Trixie).

The follow-up to their 2023 debut, Bingo! fizzes with ideas, with Félix Bélisle’s prominent basslines and Éliane Viens’s versatile and vibrant vocals giving Nah Nah and Bingo a real energy. 

The intensity drops slightly on Princesse and the aptly named Chill Pill, but there’s no attendant drop-off in quality. If there’s a criticism, it’s that though individually each of these 10 songs sounds fresh and beguiling, across the course of an album, La Sécurité never quite transcend their influences. Still, there’s much to relish in this engaging exercise in upbeat maximalism. Phil Mongredien 

Where Rivers Meet

Your Brother’s Keeper and Gary Bartz

(Brownswood Recordings)

At 85, the spiritual jazz pioneer and Miles Davis collaborator Gary Bartz is still seeking out fresh forms of improvisation. In 2020, he collaborated with new UK jazz group Maisha on a funk-inflected live session, while in 2021 he released an album of moody, hip-hop influenced instrumentals with A Tribe Called Quest producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge. Where Rivers Meet revisits his Maisha collaboration, featuring a stellar British backing band including drummer Jake Long, pianist Al MacSween and saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael.

Bartz’s gossamer tone is here processed through atmospheric synths to reveal a darker side to his playing. Droning bass and tinkling chimes provide the ambient backing on the yearning opening track Cauldron, while breathy horns create an eerie soundworld on the highlight Eclipse. Bartz’s band provide a natural foundation for his saxophone experiments throughout, with Long’s textural drumming creating space for keening notes and Carmichael’s tenor providing a lower-register foil. It’s a late-career triumph that proves Bartz can still surprise. Ammar Kalia

One to watch: Theatre

These days new British acts are mostly solo artists, largely thanks to TikTok’s influence over music discovery. Social media favours the singleton. By comparison, groups are thriving in Ireland, especially in its blooming alt-rock scene, with Fontaines DC, the Murder Capital and NewDad lighting the way for excellent, noisy new bands such as Gurriers, Sprints, Just Mustard and Divil. Now enter Theatre, a promising quintet rebutting the lie that acts must go viral or die. 

The Limerick band took four years getting to know each other – playing, writing, performing, sharpening their songcraft and patiently assembling the right lineup before releasing a first single this April. The time was well spent. “We carved a philosophy out of performance because we were solely a live band,” says singer Maeve, whose intriguing lyrics and evocative voice add flavour to the band’s grand indie sound. 

Their debut EP brims with powerful songs and ideas. It’s loosely themed around the perfidious figure of a Wendigo – a giant cannibalistic creature – and opens with a track inspired by 16th-century Christmas carol Gaudete. The Fall, their best song so far, closes the show: visceral, precise, it pulses with all the mystery they’ve spent years rehearsing. Damien Morris

Theatre’s Incarnate EP is out now, with a headline UK tour in October

Photographs by Linette Messina, Yumna Al-Arashi, Kristin Sollecito, Cian Mac Coille

LINETTE MESSINA and Kristin Sollecito