{"title":"Staff Albums of the Year 2022","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"quiet-the-room","title":"Quiet the Room","description":"\u003cp\u003eHelen Ballentine’s spellbinding first full-length album\u003ci\u003e Quiet the Room\u003c\/i\u003e is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls out. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in order to show up for the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drew inspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she set out to capture on \u003ci\u003eQuiet the Room\u003c\/i\u003e was not the innocence of childhood, as it is so often portrayed, but the intense complexity of it. Past and present merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elements of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound that feels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse of copper corroding.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock, Ballentine and her partner and collaborator Noah Weinman brought in producer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate New York, close to where Ballentine grew up. “We wanted every song to have that little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling,” she says. These songs thrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace, as on lead single “Whatever Fits Together,” which chugs to a ragged start before the gears catch and ease. On “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine struggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can ever fully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to cross a barrier and leave a part of ourselves behind. And yet, on closing track “You are my House,” she finds a way to reach out. “You are the walls and floors of my room,” she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we bend a giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine has created. Like a kid constructing a shelter in a patch of sharp brambles, she reminds us that beauty and terror can exist in the same place. 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The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships – platonic, familial, romantic – and more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life? The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith \u003cem\u003eExpert\u003c\/em\u003e, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. They wanted it to be fun - to hear, to play - in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMost of \u003cem\u003eExpert\u003c\/em\u003e was recorded at guitarist \u003cstrong\u003eJonathan Pearce\u003c\/strong\u003e’s studio on Karangahape Road in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) - and sometimes in the building's cavernous stairwell at 1am - toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThey traded notes remotely for months, songwriting from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone, the first time they’d written together in such a way. The following February, The Beths left the country for the first time in more than two years to tour across the US, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat latter half felt more collaborative, with everyone on-hand to trade notes in real time, until it all culminated in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. There, \u003cem\u003eExpert\u003c\/em\u003e finally became the record they were hearing in their heads.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eExpert\u003c\/em\u003e is an extension of the same skuzzy palette the band has built across their catalog, pop hooks embedded in incisive indie rock. The album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. “Love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe rest is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum. “Your Side” is a forlorn and sincere love song, emotive; while “Silence is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e“When You Know You Know” skews a bit groovier, pure pop and a natural addition to the band’s live set. “Knees Deep” was written last minute, but yields one of the best guitar lines on \u003cem\u003eExpert\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere’s a certain chaos across the 12 tracks, the palpable joy of playing music with long-time friends colliding with the raw nerves of pain. Stokes strings it all together through her singular songwriting lens, earnest and self-effacing, zeroing in on the granules of doubt and how they snowball.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDid I do the wrong thing? Or did you? And are we still good people at the end of it? She isn’t interested in villains, but instead interested in just telling the story. That insecurity and thoughtfulness, translated into universality and understanding, has been the guiding light of The Beths’ output since 2016.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn the face of pain, there’s no dwelling on internal anguish - instead, through The Beths’ music, our shortcomings are met with acceptance. 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With urgent delivery and gloriously widescreen production, Carner confronts both the deeply personal (“You can’t hate the roots of a tree, and not hate the tree. So how can I hate my father without hating me?) and the highly political (“I told the black man he didn’t understand I reached the white man he wouldn’t take my hand”). \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy continuing to write in these tumultuous times with a renewed clarity and sense of artistic freedom, Carner reached deeper beneath the surface than he ever had before. The result is his most cathartic and ambitious record yet, a coruscating journey into the heart of what it means to be alive in these tumultuous times, and one which looks set to neatly cement his position as one of the most potent and vital young talents around today. Working alongside renowned producer kwes. 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Much of Soul Jazz Records’ catalogue comes out of these genres and this album is partly an overview of some of Soul Jazz’s earlier releases (including Digital Mystikz’ long-deleted groundbreaking and now highly-collectible single, ‘Misty Winter’) alongside some choice rare and classic tunes that span over 30 years of sound system culture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany of the tracks represent how Black British artists defined their own identity with songs such as Brown Sugar’s righteous ‘Black Pride’, ‘I’m In Love with A Dreadlocks’ and Tabby Cat Kelly’s powerful ‘Don’t Call Us Immigrants’. Aside from being musically rooted in the distinctly Jamaican-born phenomenon of the sound system, much of this identity is also shaped by the triangular relationship of being British-born, of Caribbean heritage, and with an equal love of African-American Jazz, Funk and Soul, as evidenced with many Lovers Rock tunes reggae covers of American soul tunes (such as those of Jean Carn, William de Vaughan and Rose Royce featured here). 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