The Strobe Lights Are Heavy

Joshua Idehen “You Wanna Dance or What?”

“You Wanna Dance or What?” dramatizes a scene at a dance club. The music starts out blaring a soul sample from a Tommy McGee record sped up and sliced into a new riff. The beat shifts and Joshua Idehen is suddenly lost in thought, wondering why he’s in his head rather than feeling present in the party. Then he’s outside the club, and the music recedes into the background. A man notices him, truly sees him in this moment, and tells him “There is so much darkness in this world, but not in this room, and not between us.”

This encounter and that line in particular is the conceptual through line of Idehen’s new record I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have to Try. It’s about realizing that no matter how bleak the world gets, we need each other and we need joy. Connection, creativity, expression, pleasure – these are the essentials of life, in good times and especially in bad times. Idehen and his collaborator Ludvig Parment largely explore these notions in the context of ecstatic dance music, which makes sense. What could be a better shorthand for communal connection than a dance club?

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Gorillaz featuring Mark E. Smith “Delirium”

Damon Albarn used unreleased audio from his collaborations with several deceased artists on the new Gorillaz record, a concept record that’s largely fixated on death and the afterlife. I’m a bit lukewarm on the album, but I like this conceit and think his use of the late Mark E. Smith is inspired. The Fall singer is basically the voice of an angry, capricious, and inscrutable god. An irritable and confusing god you must try to appease. It’s the ideal role for Smith, and it’s fun to go back to old Fall records and imagine it all as the gospel of this strange English deity.

Buy it from Amazon.