5 new releases we love: Shura gets intimate, Ross From Friends has an epiphany, and more
Shura, forevher
[Secretly Canadian, August 16]
From her very first single in 2014, Aleksandra Denton, best known as Shura, has penned romantic anthems from a perspective both blatantly queer and wholly transcending sexual orientation. On sophomore album Forevher, Denton narrows her focus, narrating the joys and challenges of long-distance dating over funky, psychedelia-brushed synthpop soundscapes that shift to match each song’s story. On album zenith “religion (u can lay your hands on me),” as Denton sings about aggressively lusting for her new girlfriend, she bolsters her appetite with Prince-like synth grooves that reflect the song’s genesis in Minneapolis, where her relationship began. As she meditates on flying between her native U.K. and her girlfriend’s U.S. on “flyin’” and “princess leia,” her slow-flowing, crystalline synths sound as airy as the sky. In molding her melodies to her words, Denton ensures that listeners of all sexualities can easily navigate forevher’s invigorating sonic and romantic geography. [Max Freedman]
Lonnie Liston Smith, Astral Traveling
[Real Gone, August 2]
In the early 1970s, Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano playing was the spaceship whose structural integrity gave Pharoah Sanders the freedom to explore the benevolent outer reaches of the cosmos. While working in the iteration of Miles Davis’ band that recorded the funk-fusion classic On the Corner, Smith put together a starry-eyed group of his own and returned to the launchpad he’d built with the Sanders group. He revisits his arrangement of the gospel classic “Let Us Go Into The House Of The Lord,” which he recorded with Pharoah three years prior, brushing away some of the stardust but retaining the song’s indelible sense of possibility. “In Search Of Truth,” meanwhile, somehow seeks out Alice Coltrane’s droning mysticism and classical tidiness at the same time. With its relatively (relatively!) condensed structures and harmonic clarity, Astral Traveling presents a remarkably accessible side-door into spiritual jazz for anyone trying to follow the beckon of Kamasi Washington’s horn. [Marty Sartini Garner]