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The Best Record You’ve Never Heard
Shedding light on Jamie Isaac’s wonderful (04:30) Idler.
I’ve been having a bit of a musical dry spell. Don’t get me wrong — it has been a really, really good year for music this year in terms of my favourite artists releasing and with my favourite rapper, Earl Sweatshirt, now having a confirmed album coming mid-January it continues to look good on a personal level, but I have been focusing all too much on the same handful of artists for the most part. Sticking to your usuals is always fun — it is for good reason that they are your usuals after all — but there’s something so powerful about that jolt of electrical energy that can come with discovering a phenomenal record from a new artist. There’s that wonderful element of surprise, the act of being caught off guard and being taken away from yourself for a little while when you expected to simply zone in and out of a soundscape for a little while.
The latest album to grab me in that way, and the first to do it in a few months (which, considering I tend to listen to an album or two per day, is more shocking than it initially sounds) was UK artist Jamie Isaac’s second album (04:30) Idler. It is a stunning record in a way that is hard to immediately express, so, allow me to go a little slower and try to show you what I mean specifically.
