Skip to main content

unheralded

Fifty-nine records by artists who should be much better known. That is the whole brief, and it is the hardest kind of playlist to make well.

Unheralded Vol. 1

A set built on the premise that the artist deserves more attention is only as good as the ear behind it, because there is no famous record to fall back on. This one holds up because the selections are unified by taste rather than by obscurity — nothing is here merely because it is little-known.

What emerges is a specific aesthetic: singer-songwriters working in soul, folk and electronic music simultaneously, mostly self-produced, mostly released outside the major-label system. It is the sound of what happened to soul music once the industry stopped funding it.

What to listen for

Mac Ayres' "Waiting" is the best argument on the list — a young multi-instrumentalist making records in his bedroom that sound like a band in a good room.

Mpho Sebina appears twice, and that is the discovery here: a Botswanan singer whose records deserve a far larger audience than they have found.

The Foreign Exchange's "Shelter" is the veterans' entry — Phonte and Nicolay have spent twenty years making excellent records that almost nobody outside the fanbase hears.

Cautious Clay's "Cold War" and Liam Bailey's "So, Down Cold" are the two most distinctive voices, and Bailey's is genuinely unusual — a British singer with a rasp that sounds fifty years older than he is.

ANOHNI's "Drone Bomb Me" is the boldest inclusion by far, and it belongs here: a protest record disguised as a love song.

Sunni Colón, Johnny Rain, Leo Kalyan and Nick Urb are the deepest cuts, and Son Little's "Lay Down" is the most immediately gripping.

Patrick Watson's "Broken" and Matt Corby's "Miracle Love" are the non-soul selections that most repay following up.

Go deeper

Mac Ayres' Drive Slow and The Foreign Exchange's Authenticity are the two albums to start with.

ANOHNI's HOPELESSNESS is one of the most important records of the last decade and almost nothing like the rest of this playlist, which is a point in the playlist's favour.

Why it works: a playlist of unknowns has nowhere to hide, because there is no famous record to carry a weak stretch. This one survives fifty-nine tracks because the selections are unified by an actual aesthetic — self-produced, warm, harmonically curious — rather than by the fact of obscurity. Nothing is here simply because it is rare.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more