Tony Stamp assesses an album of dubwise delights from Auckland DJ Stinky Jim, a pleasantly polite outing by UK five-piece Babeheaven, and a selection of snackable soul courtesy of NYC producer Carrtoons.
Spacial Awareness by Stinky Jim
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For the past 32 years, Jim ‘Stinky Jim’ Pinckney has been broadcasting his show Stinky Grooves to listeners in Auckland and beyond, a weekly selection that’s meticulously curated from music all around the globe. It orbits the world of reggae, but Jim has tastes broad enough to extend out to atmospheric electronics, cumbia and plenty more.
To give some idea of his status on the scene, when Lee Scratch Perry died last year, people like music journalist Nick Dwyer and Ruban Nielson from Unknown Mortal Orchestra tweeted at Jim saying it was his show that had introduced them to the legendary Jamaican producer.
Pinckney has been making his own music in various outfits for some time now, but his first solo full-length only arrived last year. And he’s apparently hit a fertile streak - less than 12 months later number two has arrived.
He was one-third of pioneering dub outfit Unitone Hifi, and one-half of Phase 5. At the end of the 1990s, he founded the boutique label Round Trip Mars, signing acts that included post-punk and alt-rock outfits.
His tastes run wide, and all feed into the music he creates. This second solo album Spacial Awareness is defined by its dubwise bottom end, but also its anything-goes approach to audio. Take the way ‘Owner Face’ places sci-fi sound effects next to a bassy vocal sample, and snatches of a melody that’s downright heart-rending.
Some of these tracks feel like grab-bags of sound snippets Pinckney has been waiting to deploy, the kind of sample-heavy patchworks that evoke his past outfits. There’s also a certain type of frivolity that provides a throughline.
Elsewhere the emphasis is more melodic. ‘Cry for the Ute’ is powered by multilayered rhythms, but its best aspect is its arsenal of upbeat keyboard lines.
It’s tracks like that which find a rich vein of emotion, almost despite the snatches of spoken word throughout.
Similarly, ‘Flames of Love’ aims for the heart, with help from some perfectly placed horn parts and vocal melody.
During his career, Pinckney has spent time in Jamaica visiting studios and meeting artists, and that connection continues here on the track 'Steam Fish', which features Jamaican vocalist Nazamba, who tragically died the month before this album’s release.
Their collaboration is a yearning love song, with Nazamba’s gurgling baritone over Jim’s below-ground bass and keyboard stabs.
It’s a particularly poignant addition to a surprisingly sentimental album. Stinky Jim is already renowned as a selector, and as a musician, he’s proving to be gratifyingly adventurous.
Sink Into Me by Babeheaven
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We’ve been in the pandemic long enough now that musicians have put out multiple albums while in a state of lockdown. Such is the case with London outfit Babeheaven, whose first two full-lengths were written and recorded during 2020 and 2021.
Their music feels as confined as that might suggest, but it’s not a bad thing. Rather it adds a sense of tension to their second album Sink Into Me, as if they’re about to erupt, but are too polite to go through with it.
On their debut, Babeheaven were a duo consisting of singer Nancy Andersen and producer & multi-instrumentalist Jamie Travis. On this one, they’ve expanded to five, and while the feel of the music hasn’t changed, its palette has shifted from keys and programmed drums into something that feels more live.
Musically they occupy a space somewhere in between indie jangle and UK R&B. ‘The Hours’ has some of the French band Stereolab in its breezy chord progression, whereas ones like the moodier ‘Fading’ play with something approaching soul riffs.
Andersen has a voice that’s deceptively straightforward; not flashy but able to negotiate bursts of emotion. In terms of hooks, the instrumentation does a lot of the work.
They’re a band operating in the kind of terrain that, when Navy Blue starts rapping on the song ‘Make me Wanna', it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
There’s a synth running through that song that keeps threatening to fizz over but never quite does. That staid approach feels very British to me, and a lot of these tracks are the kind of tasteful tunes that may have found their way onto a café-themed compilation in the nineties alongside acid jazz and trip-hop.
Even the faster tempo on ‘Erase Me’ feels closer to, say, Belle & Sebastian than krautrock.
In an interview with Bricks Magazine, Nancy Andersen spoke about reviewers interpreting her lyrics as erotic, particularly those that gave the album its name. But, she says, while writing the title song she was “ thinking about the clouds that engulf London on a grey day” and how she wants “to fall into them”.
It’s hard not to notice the underlying sadness of a remark like that, and perhaps not coincidentally the band has hit pause on its upcoming tour.
But the album isn’t maudlin, it’s thoroughly poised, and that might be its biggest strength. All the elements here are held together by a kind of remove as if, were anything to shift too much, it might all topple down.
Homegrown by Carrtoons
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A new type of music video has sprung up over the past few years thanks to the success of formats like TikTok; wherein what used to be called a ‘bedroom producer’ will film themselves recording each part of a track, until eventually you’re hearing the whole thing.
There are rising stars in this genre, and their success tends to be based not just on music quality, but how well the images reveal the artists’ process. The clips are educational as well as entertaining.
This is the world that New York producer Carrtoons has emerged from. And he crosses over with another type of internet media where people play their instrument for the camera - typically people who are very good at it. His instrument is the bass guitar, but it doesn’t define his music, which takes the form of a snackable type of soul.
Ben Carr has been playing his bass for an internet audience since around 2014 if his Instagram is anything to go by. Look at his account and you’ll see him operating a sampler simultaneously, playing keys and even singing.
His voice can be heard throughout his second album, but it’s usually backgrounded in favour of guests like Nigel Hall, who we just heard on ‘Groceries’, or Julia Zivic and Lo Artiz on ‘Pressure’.
In the past, Carr has built tracks around soul samples, but on this album, he used sounds ripped from family VHS tapes. That’s partly why the album is called Homegrown - the other reason is it was recorded entirely in his apartment.
That’s Floyd Fuji adding some classic R&B flavours to ‘Read My Lips’. Elsewhere Carrtoons explores rap, funk, and instrumentals that are nostalgic and cinematic, but always with a backbone of soul.
Mostly Ben Carr interests me as a new type of musician; one that wouldn’t exist without the internet. The music sounds familiar but the approach - documenting the process, and having that be a part of the product - is new. His webcam is more crucial to his success than how many shows he’s played.
The platform also alters the music in terms of its brevity - only one song reaches the 3-minute mark. Chalk it up to lack of attention span perhaps, but the quilt of beats and bass that make up Homegrown cohere into a complete statement the more you listen.
