The Friday Dispatch
Leifur James, Elvis Costello, bby, Edith Frost, and Stranger Cat
Leifur James finds purpose in unexpected places
On his third album, Magic Seeds, London-born, Lisbon-based experimental songwriter and producer Leifur James is searching for balance. After a journey of looking for harmony in his own life, his latest work finds him navigating environmental and societal upheaval with organic songwriting and studio edits, positioning dark themes of modern life against the hope of a better future.
Growing up in the UK capital, James’ love of dance and electronic music had him exploring the city's underground nightlife from a young age, but it was at the legendary Plastic People that he found his formative inspiration. “When I was fourteen I went to raves under Vauxhall Bridge and was coming back at god knows what time. It was so cold, but there was this great warmth of the music culture in London that I feel balances that quite literal cold in the morning,” he smiles. “I'd come through that sort of post-dubstep era in 2009 and then hearing Plastic People and the warmth of the tones from world music just really inspired me.”
James was also influenced by his uncle, a jazz guitarist who opened his world to a wider range of genres. In his early teens, he developed a passion for film, with scenes from cinema still impacting his writing today. “I was watching the Cohen brothers films and they always had this kind of warm, African-American jazz in their films, and artists like Nina Simone were a big part of my tutelage,” he says. “It’s the feeling that when you're hit with a scene in a film or a book or a TV show that really impacts you in a very deep way, and it's not just from one element. It’s not just the sound or the visual, it's how the narrative combines with the sound and visual and takes you at that point.”
In a similar way, the influence of place on James’ creative process has been paramount. He often finds himself soaking in his surroundings, internalizing them so he is able to refract those findings in his work. That’s why, in 2023, James began transitioning his life from London to Lisbon. This move helped Magic Seeds assume its form. A process of trial and testing, he built a loose vision for the album around scraps recorded during a single-day session at a London studio with friends and collaborators last year. As he made his move, James began editing, adding his own ideas and letting the change in setting shift his approach wherever appropriate or necessary. “I think this record is in that sort of transition as well,” he says. “It was born in London, but Lisbon really helped me make the final decisions, just walking around with the air and the lights. It's a lighter record than my previous one and I think that was somewhat influenced by how I finished it in Lisbon.”
This week at Best Fit, like the rest of the internet, we’ve been taking time to digest and to love Father John Misty’s Mahashmashana and Kendrick Lamar’s GNX. Also out this week is Aisha Badru’s gentle, folk-soaked record, The Sun Still Rises; Matt-Felix’s 70s-inspired Kingdom of You and Me; the excellent first project, TAPE 1, from mysterious R&B newcomer H.LLS; and the wacky but wonderful Poor Charlie Markel by gggggggggggggg. Ex-Howling Bells singer Juanita Stein also dropped her fourth solo record The Weightless Hour.
Elvis Costello on 1981’s “New Lace Sleeves”
If people only have a cursory knowledge of my work, they know what the sound of The Attractions playing a pop song like “Oliver's Army” is, or a rock and roll sound like “Pump It Up” is, or they might know “Watching the Detectives”, which was recorded with different musicians. They know what those records sound like. But, of course, we became a band that developed and by the time we got to our fifth record, Trust, we'd been through quite a lot of adventures and misadventures. This was the record that was made in the afterglow of all of that and it distilled into something quite original.
“New Lace Sleeves” is a wonderful performance of that band. The Attractions had a pretty powerful attack, particularly live, but this song is the other side of the band, the side able to play controlled, organised music. You can hear the musicality of all four players, particularly the rhythm section. Steve Nieve’s role was playing almost orchestrally. He's not playing rhythm, he's playing the decoration. The guitar is very simple but it's locked in with the rhythm and the singing. It's a fairly sophisticated melody as well – unusually sophisticated for its time, harmonically and everything.
Weirdly enough, the lyric was started when I was 19 and had been carried from notebook to notebook. I never discarded any words. There were some lines that were in the original draft of a song that had a different title, and they became part of the story of “New Lace Sleeves”. But I couldn't have made that song into our reality until we reached this particular point, as a band that was almost on the verge of exhaustion, creatively and physically. In a way, it's similar to King of America – there was nowhere else to hide but within that particular picture that we're making. There was really no other way to play that song. That's why I would pay the band the compliment of everybody realising their best game at that moment on that record. It's a really good record.
The introduction
Dripping in infectious riffs and cheeky hooks, London-based bby are bringing good old fashioned fun back to the indie scene.
Names… Deon, TJ, Jessy, Tommy, and Benjy.
Hometowns… Northampton, Southampton, Paris, Bologna, and London.
Describe your sound… Phone rock.
How you started making music together… We all met online. Benjy and Tommy met first on insta. Started making choons on zoom. Realised we had to start a band and then assembled the rest of the avengers from tiktok. And then somehow we made it out the group chat.
What's a hang? What makes a good one… It’s a messy gig, normally not in a venue, a basement, off license, a kitchen, a backyard, a workshop, . Anywhere you would wanna hang really. Best hangs = random beautiful space + crowd of friendly weirdos + lots of jams.
Most essential item in bby HQ… Double decker sofa.
What you're ordering in the pub after the show…
Deon — Guinness blackcurrant / TJ — Just one pint, only one / Jessy — Very zesty, flamboyant cocktail / Tommy — Chalice of Blood / Benjy — Rubicon
Bby’s latest single “Pretty Boy, Pt. 2 (feat. Zino Vinci)” is out now via Glassnote Music.
Welcome to the new world….
If the ongoing online migration from X — formerly and fondly remembered as Twitter — to Bluesky is leaving you bemused, you’ve come to the right place. We at Best Fit finally made the platform jump this week, and now we’re here to help all the rest of you Bluesky-curious folk.
As a decentralised social platform, Bluesky began as a solution to the problems associated with traditional social media and was set up by a bunch of engineers who left X/Twitter after Elon Musk took over. The app operates on a different model entirely from X/Twitter because decentralisation means that users have some say in what happens on Bluesky, as well as a lot more control over content. It's a lot like Twitter or Facebook was before money became way more important than users.
To help everyone find their footing, Best Fit has put together a bunch of Starter packs that include more than 110 record labels; 70 music blogs, magazines, websites, and curators; 40 venues; and 30 record stores to help newcomers on the platform build the ultimate music feed. As the app soars to over 23 million users, we're hoping to be part of a change that creates a better online home for our love of music (and talking about it a lot).
Something Old, Something New
Every week, we share recommendations from the Best Fit community on two iconic records — one from the past, one from the present. This week, features editor Alan Pedder on Telescopic by Edith Frost (1998) and Slow Jam Love Letters to My Body in Pieces by Stranger Cat (2024).
I’ve been thrown back in time this week with the announcement of a new Edith Frost album coming in February, a full 20 years after her last long-player It’s a Game. Truthfully, I could have chosen any of the Texan’s slim discography to rave about here, but Telescopic, her second album, stands out in particular for its note-perfect marriage of woozy tradition and rolling, queasy waves of feedback and distortion.
Arriving in the fall of ‘98, within a month of Cat Power’s equally gut-punching Moon Pix, stepping into Telescopic’s world of refracted Americana feels like entering a barroom staffed by the ghosts of lovers gone by and feeling the thermometer drop by a full ten degrees. “Oh, it hurts to stare at your picture and think of how it could have been,” she sings deliriously on the torridly askew “Tender Kiss”, her voice like a cool hand on the song’s sweaty brow. I love how Frost has a way of sounding dangerously serene even at her lyrically most savage; to whomever inspired the home truths of “You Belong to No One” and “The Very Earth”, my condolences. That had to hurt, but with such economic beauty.
You might not guess it from Telescopic but Edith Frost is also very funny, especially when dragging the world’s worst billionaire and biggest baby Elon Musk. There is humour in these songs, though, if you look for it. Most obviously in “My Capture”, with its warped, kitschy backdrop and infatuated lyrics, and in the mocking la la las of “You Belong to No One”. For pure hypnotic beauty, though, look no further than the untethered title track, grounded only by the rumbling rapture of Amy Domingues’ cello. The pathos is the payoff, and vice versa.
Surely a contender for album title of the year, Slow Jam Love Letters to My Body in Pieces is the long-in-the-works second release from Miami-based Stranger Cat, formerly a duo, now a solo endeavour. The woman behind it? Sufjan Stevens and Sharon van Etten collaborator Cat Martino, who quintuples as musician, yogi, light artist, dancer and sound healer. Which, as it turns out, is an ideal combination of interests for entirely self-producing a neon-stained filigree electronic pop record about the dogged human spirit and clawing one’s way out of an emotional sinkhole.
I haven’t seen Martino’s mood board for Slow Jams… but it might as well have read “Long dark night of the soul but make it sexy.” Written in the wake of an accident that left her wheelchair- and bed-bound for several months and faced with the possibility of never walking unaided again, it’s a record that flickers, pulses and occasionally throbs with sensuality and grit. Martino courts her body as both a lover and a muse, making an art of romancing her pain and slow dancing through disaster. Her vocals here feel luxuriously expressive in a way that I hadn’t fully appreciated before, purring and gliding through sound design tableaus of layered, shimmery synth work and velvet-gloved beats – with an unexpected dip into French chanson on the lovely “Périlleux”. If this is what real self-care sounds like, I’m sold.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists – 20 new tracks from the last five days in music that we’ve got on repeat in the Best Fit office right now.
Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Nukuluk, Housewife, MOULD, BIG WETT and coverstar Bellzzz.
You may not agree with a lot of contemporary criticism – and if you don’t you’re not alone, a lot of it drives me up the wall, and I’m not even exempting my own website from this observation – but it is, essentially, a friend who is always there for you; albeit a friend who can occasionally be infuriating and difficult to get on with.