No Frills Reviews

The multi-talented, Rhys Langston, is a musician, visual artist, and writer from LA. Polyglot on Chloroform, his genre-defying collaboration with veteran Brooklyn producer, Steel Tipped Dove, was no. 3 in our top EPs of the year. He tells us what captured his attention in 2024.

Favourite Song

Nilüfer Yanya – Call It Love: It is a truism, even if trite these days, to say we are in an age of overfed irony. However, when an artist like Nilüfer Yanya comes crooning over her guitar on a song like Call It Love, it jolts the senses beyond our landscape of meme jokes and empty emotional affect. The most stirring track of the year for me, it comes across as both a futuristic Fleetwood Mac homage and the best distillation of her harmonic idiosyncrasy.

• Bandcamp

Favourite Album

Cavalier – Different Type Time: In a different epoch this record would be the biggest thing out. But alas, we are in a time of timelines and Moore’s Law of newscycle rapidity. The turnover of information would have us believe we must move on before we can metabolize any thoughts on any matter. Cavalier, in perhaps a casually cool and intentional defiance, packs 21 tracks into Different Type Time to let us know that he’s been here all along and is going at his own pace. An evolving time capsule yet to be dissolved in the stomach acid of our era, still holding shape. As an artist dealing with the realities of what it is to be obscured in my creative practice, this record is a dope reminder that we get to define our staying power, so long as we keep woodshedding. 

• Bandcamp

Favourite Call-to-Arms

Saul Williams – KILL THE MACHINE (over my dead body): Where does a speech become an essay, or prose become poetry, or “saying it as it is” become mutiny? Saul Williams’ keynote speech from the End of Empire and Future of Freedom Conference at UC Santa Barbara makes such dichotomies and distinctions irrelevant. An interdisciplinary call-to-arms, he connects all the threads of our critical moment in human history by weaving history, historiography, his unique multiple entendre, and trenchant, poetic political analysis. With this radical reminder of our connected human spirit, he makes me remember my dreams and the vision necessary to cut through the mess.