#2479 Karima Walker - Hands in our Names

That cover image - geometric, offcenter, textured, printed, earthy, abstract, cozy, uninterested, eternal.

The contradiction of Karima Walker's latest is in its warmness and coldness, its folk heart and its electronic body, its intimate coos in your ear and its vast, patient emptiness.

Every word feels meant and important, even as they're sliced into nothingness, or echoed and panned helixical around your head; even as they're separated by yawning seas of prickle and buzz, as if Walker has no control over the album's structure. She has put messages in bottles, written with great desperation, in hopes you might find them, yellowed and smudged, someday.

Something unhuman and uninterested in humanity dominates, with glimpses of what matters in between. It's the kind of earned audacity you'd see in The Microphones or Olivia Tremor Control, with Anna Meredith's daring sense of sound. The kind of thing you with Brian Eno could pull off a little more often. Excellent, exciting, eternal stuff 4.5/5