Crave returns this week with another new music playlist – open your ears and feast on a wide assortment of goodness from With Lions, Laura Mvula, RJD2, Hinds and more. If you see something you haven’t heard, that’s a good thing. That’s why we’re doing this. Trust us with your ears, and we’ll bring you the goods – along with a double-shot of poignant sociopolitical awareness from M.I.A. and Kate Tempest. Kick off your weekend with the best sounds and just a little bit more sauce in your step, knowing you’ve got a leg up on the good stuff.
Keep up with CraveOnline on Spotify, where we’ll be updating a new music playlist every week throughout the year.
With Lions – ‘Fight Back’
With Lions just droped a new LP called Fast Luck – their first offering since 2012’s Equipo EP. Built on the inspiration of rich-blooded cultural roots of old Delta blues heroes, the collection is an exhilarating mix of R&B passion, rhythmic intensity and blues-rock power to kick off 2016 with some true momentum. “Fight Back” delivers an infusion of new blood into classic territories, with a stomp-clap backdrop presenting a thrusting melodic rhythm that’s equal parts sexy and dangerous, under a swarming guitar riff and an electrifying gang chorus.
– Johnny Firecloud, Crave Music editor
Laura Mvula – ‘Overcome’
Laura Mvula kicks off her new single “Overcome” a cappella, singing “When your heart is broken down, down, down / and your head don’t reach the sky / take your broken wings and fly…” On the word fly, a rumbling beat kicks in simultaneously with skittering guitar lines from the legendary Nile Rodgers. For the next three glorious minutes we get an Mvula that’s instantly familiar (that powerful voice; uplifting lyrics steeped in spirituality) in a beat-driven context no one could have predicted following her debut album Sing to the Moon, or the re-recording of it with the Dutch Metropole Orkest.
The classically trained Mvula knows that space and silence are powerful tools in a musician’s arsenal. ‘Overcome’ builds to a sweepingly dramatic climax through lush choral arrangements of layered vocals, synth flourishes, and a funky groove centered on the nimble finger work of Mr. Rodgers, but it’s the soft breaths and quiet in-between spaces that hold it all together beautifully.
– Ernest Hardy, Crave Music writer
RJD2 – ‘Peace of What’
RJD2 just-announced a new album, Dame Fortune, out March 25 via his own Electrical Connections imprint. Inspired by Main Source’s 1991 commentary “Peace Is Not the Word to Play,” the LP’s first listen, “Peace Of What,” is rich with a big, full band of strings and horns and singer Jordan Brown’s evocative verses about the modern-day state of the world.
– Johnny Firecloud, Crave Music editor
David Bowie – ‘Girl Loves Me’
David Bowie’s latest LP ‘Blackstar’ is predictably unpredictable, a masterpiece even without the newly added coat of sorrow in his departure. A labyrinth of remarkably fresh ideas, after hearing him croon the words “She kept my cock” in ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore,’ I was made very aware that despite the presence of his beloved saxophone this was, again, not the Bowie we heard in his last album.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in album highlight ‘Girl Loves Me,’ wherein Bowie clearly echoes the tightly produced yet acutely angry trappings of modern hip-hop, yelping “Where the fuck did Monday go?” alongside a minimalist backing of a static drumbeat and a droning synth. It’s knowingly divisive, with its impenetrable (even by Bowie’s own standards) lyrics and his cracked vocals, and it’s the weirdest oddity in what is a particularly mad bag of music.
– Paul Tamburro, UK Editor
Kate Tempest – ‘Europe is Lost’
With her new single, the cerebrally ferocious lyricism of UK spitfire queen Kate Tempest just set fire to every unspoken rug-swept bit of dirty laundry pop culture has conveniently shielded itself from in the daily news cycle.
With the Dan-Carey-produced “Europe Is Lost,” Tempest reminds us that protest songs can – and should – be more than kumbayas about peace and ending war. The track is a disgusted diagnosis of Fuckall Culture through an urgent and laser-focused but weary delivery, spun between the matter-of-fact butter cadence of Brother Ali and Scroobius Pip. Initially praising the apparent state of prosperity, she’s soon lamenting the “roots dug up from the ground” and feeling, like many of us do, that we’ve gotta do something to change the formula. To shake the complacency. But she sees the odds, and she knows the game is rigged.
– Johnny Firecloud, Crave Music editor
