Albums of the week: Jim Legxacy, Alex G, Panic Shack, Dennis Bovell

Black British Music

Jim Legxacy

(XL)

Rapper, singer and producer Jim Legxacy is becoming one of his generation’s most compelling artists. His previous long-form mixtape, Homeless N*gga Pop Music (2023), spun the young south Londoner’s experience of a precarious housing situation into a panoply of shapes, torching genre assumptions as he went.

Black British Music doubles down on that approach. Repeating the album’s title throughout like a producer tag, Legxacy – born James Olaloye – channels the trauma of the death of his younger sister. Father encapsulates his ability to tell his story via pop bricolage. Here, a pitch-shifted vocal hook (“Father!”) punctuates a potted autobiography that takes in listening to Mitski while dealing drugs.

Even without this emotive backstory, his talents would be unmissable. Frank Ocean is an obvious influence, but Legxacy’s work is distinctly British: there are frequent references to Windrush and one song is called I Just Banged a Snus in Canada Water. From the flat-out indie rock of ’06 Wayne Rooney to Issues of Trust, which sounds like something by an emo Ed Sheeran, you are left with the sense that Legxacy is a more mainstream heir to the underground polymath Dean Blunt. By Kitty Empire

Headlights

Alex G

(RCA Records)

Over the course of a 15-year career, Alex Giannascoli has gone from bedroom pop progenitor, unceremoniously posting his scrawled, deeply felt experiments on the internet, to one of the most successful and important indie artists of his generation. His catalogue has more than 2bn streams on Spotify alone and he has worked with pop stars such as Frank Ocean and Halsey. And yet his music remains admirably, resolutely Alex G, which is to say: oblique, sometimes challenging, world-weary, always beautiful.

Headlights, his 10th album, is no exception. Like 2022’s God Save the Animals, it feels a little like a hazy misremembering of a classic 90s rock record: the yelping Afterlife has a surging, heartwarming intensity and Louisiana is downtrodden and lurching – arena rock that sounds as if it came out of some forgotten former industrial town. Giannascoli’s lyrics can feel totally opaque, but moments of diamond-hard clarity end up floating to the surface.

The nature of art’s relationship with commerce recurs on the austere title track and Beam Me Up, while other songs zero in on drifters and vagrants, people who “went out looking for a real thing”, as he puts it on the dusty, ambling Real Thing. It’s one of his warmest, sharpest records – shot through with melancholy, of course, and profoundly rewarding for it. By Shaad d’Souza

Panic Shack

Panic Shack

(Brace Yourself Records)

The ambient noise that opens the debut album by Panic Shack was recorded in a beer garden at an Amyl and the Sniffers gig, which seems apposite, given their few-frills punk occupies similar ground. But where the memorable choruses and deceptively well-honed dynamics of Amy Taylor and co elevate the Sniffers above their peers, there is a sameyness to much of this Cardiff five-piece’s output.

What Panic Shack might lack in musical finesse, however, they more than make up for lyrically. Whether frontwoman Sarah Harvey is chronicling the everyday frustrations of skirts not having pockets (Pockets) or confronting creepy male hangers-on (Smellarat), she is consistently astute.

After TikTok accusations that Panic Shack were cosplaying as a working-class band, Tit School sets the record straight: “I didn’t go to Bedales / Instead I got free meals.” Best of all is Unhinged, which takes its lyrics from men’s profiles on the Hinge dating app (“I can run backwards really quickly”).

The result is a likable album that’s big on surface entertainment, if somewhat lacking in depth. By Phil Mongredien

Wise Music in Dub

Dennis Bovell

(Wise Records)

By its nature, a dub is an ephemeral version of a track. Printed on acetate that degrades after about 100 spins, a dubplate is an exclusive test mix designed to gauge crowd responses before being altered or discarded.

On his latest record, Wise Music in Dub, Barbados-born British producer Dennis Bovell embodies the dub ethos, producing reverb-laden versions of genre-hopping tracks from the Wise Records catalogue. There are easy wins, with Bovell referencing his 80s Lovers Rock work, blending disco, reggae and R&B on a dramatic version of Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleurs titled Les Dub, featuring “Queen of Lovers Rock” singer Carroll Thompson. Meanwhile, Dutchie Dub – his take on 1981 reggae classic Pass the Kouchie – soars thanks to the lyrical steel pan playing of Swizz the Panist.

Other experiments are less successful. The version of Pete Seeger’s civil rights song Black and White takes on a lilting nursery rhyme feel due to its slowed offbeat rhythm, and the Stylistics’ You’re a Big Girl Now is a jarring choice with its cloyingly sweet falsetto vocal. Bovell’s dubs are ultimately a mixed bag, showcasing the variable nature of the format. By Ammar Kalia

Vocals are often textural, almost incidental, in shoegaze. So does it matter if a shoegazey band’s lyrics are Arabic? Actually, yes.

Nabeel is the brainchild of Iraqi-American schoolteacher Yasir Razak. Growing up in the US, the singer and guitarist eagerly feasted on western pop, but by his twenties he was increasingly obsessed with his heritage and the lives his family could have lived if they’d stayed in Iraq. After travelling around the Middle East in 2022, Razak formed Nabeel with four friends from Harrisonburg, Virginia, pouring his feelings into the band’s muscular, dynamic music.

Nabeel’s visual identity is drawn from the Razak family archives, concretising Yasir’s choice to sing in Arabic. “To preserve the connection to Arabic feels extremely important with all that’s going on in Palestine and the Middle East,” he says.

Alongside these precious acts of preservation, teaching English is also an immense privilege: many of Yasir’s pupils are first-year migrants, so his role is pastoral as well as pedagogical, as he helps them assimilate and navigate American life. Of course, none of this would matter as much if it weren’t for the thrilling intensity of songs like Resala or Yalma. Hear them on Nabeel’s latest release, Ghayoom (meaning “clouds”), which skilfully marshals power pop, sludge rock, slowcore, grunge, alt-country and shoegaze into eight malevolently pretty tracks. By Damien Morris

Ghayoom is released on 24 July

Photographs by James Olaloye; Chris Maggio; Ren Faulkner;  Adam Scott; Dianne Anguia