Listen Back: The letter R
We’re resting our record crate on the letter R in this month’s edition of our alphabetically led series of album recommendations
Formerly a member of art-punk rabble-rousers Liars, Aaron Hemphill’s second album as Nonpareils, Rhetoric & Terror (2024), is as cold, unnerving and intellectually rigorous as its title suggests, and remains criminally overlooked. Replacing Liars’ gaudy palette is a fairytale collage of plonking xylophones, trilling bass clarinets, trundling drums and seesawing guitars, held together by Hemphill’s sedated nasal drone. Its every creak and sudden lurches into post-rock evokes a mirror world of phantoms and freaks.
Breathing the same skew-whiff air is Tom Waits’ classic Rain Dogs (1985), the moment when everyone’s favourite carnival barker completed his metamorphosis from off-kilter singer-songwriter to swivel-eyed visionary. He concocts an absurdist dime-store novel of pistol fights, smoke joints and gambling dens, where even a chorus as innocuous as ‘clap hands’ stalks with threat, and where big-top polkas soundtrack slaughterhouses. Despite its cigarette-stained machismo, Waits is unafraid to engage with the heartbreak of his characters’ lives: ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’, perhaps the finest album closer ever written, imbues a story of careening loneliness with the intensity of a deathbed confession.
Other R albums: Rooting For Love by Lætitia Sadier (2024), Rid Of Me by PJ Harvey (1993), Rise Up! by Bobby Conn (1998).