This is a rather dire selection of albums, and apart from the two by artists I've highly praised in the increasingly distant past, they aren't the kind of thing I'm going to choose to review once I reform my procedure here (2020, unless I just can't take it anymore before that). I'm sorry it's such a weak and insubstantial post.
Non-new music news: I read Peter Guralnick's biography of Sam Phillips and so should you; it's a vivid portrait of a man whose importance I'd appreciated but never properly understood.
***
Manchester Orchestra: A Black Mile to the Surface (Loma Vista) [c]
Why does any band from Atlanta sound this much like David Gray fronting Elbow?
Arcade Fire: Everything Now (Columbia) [NO]
It's a fact of life that bands sometimes take a wrong step, especially on an occasion like the movement from an indie to a major label, but it's difficult to remember the last time a deservedly celebrated artist on this scale allowed music this thunderously awful to make it to the marketplace; even Interpol's famously clumsy Capitol album Our Love to Admire didn't significantly depart from an established sound so much as all too clearly demonstrate its limitations. Under the guise of disco and dance music-derived experimentation, though, Arcade Fire -- an admirably focused and compassionate unit up to this point, even if The Suburbs was a little too long and Reflektor a little too thin -- has gone down a road of irony, or lack thereof, so wrongheaded that one's temptation is to treat it as a joke... or to assume that they have completely fooled themselves into thinking that this music is somehow bracing rather than embarrassing in its directness. With pandering, condescending phony-inspirational lyrics recalling '90s Everclear and music that alternately echoes a diluted variant on Ace of Base and a radio constantly tuned to Weird Al parodies of the songs "Vogue" by Madonna and "The Magnificent Seven" by the Clash on an endless loop, the record's series of seemingly endless half-assed compositions meets no hook that cannot be run obnoxiously into the ground. The lyrics, banal as they are, aren't any worse than the generic-sounding pop factory music, but they do deserve special mention for almost thoroughly wiping out the goodwill the band earned from crafting several of the finest anthems in the history of alternative rock; the astoundingly repetitive "Chemistry" runs less than four minutes but feels twice as long because of its insistence on belaboring its simple, worn-out chorus until you're ready to hurl your phone out into the street. I've been thinking carefully about this and I think it's fair to call it the worst song ever put out by a good rock band that isn't the Beach Boys. ("Happy Endings" still holds the all-time title.) The dunderheaded wordplay of the, uh, suite "Infinite Content" and "Infinite_Content," basically a rant against sheeple and their phones or something like that, is remarkable in its brain-melting obviousness, but it takes Win Butler's horrendous vocal performance on "Good God Damn" to signal just how bad things have gotten -- is this all a big bring-it-down-from-the-inside protest against capitalism or something? Lyrics about fans considering suicide to the tune of Funeral? A song called "We Don't Deserve Love" that goes on so long without presenting anything of consequence that it would take a saint not to agree with its thesis? To release a string of sub b-side material and to sing it badly on top of that feels like trolling, but the remainder of the material does this theory in since it settles for just being incredibly boring; the title track is tolerable but quickly wears out its welcome at five full minutes plus a three-minute preview and coda. Not even Régine Chassagne's contributions or Owen Pallett's string arrangements can unsink this ship. It's not only the worst album Arcade Fire has released by far, and one of the most disappointing hat tricks of the decade, it's actively difficult to imagine anything they could have released being much worse. The only optimistic conclusion you can draw from this is that they just don't realize how bad it is, but the ugly corollary to that is: will they ever? Perhaps not, but I bet Sony will.
Randy Newman: Dark Matter (Nonesuch)
A day will come when I will finally "get it" when it comes to Randy Newman, when I will hear what the rest of you hear in his work. Today is not that day, and this is not the record that will do it; during my Beach Boys project last year I spent some time with Sail Away, which my parents played a bit when I was a kid, because of how highly Brian Wilson spoke of it... and if that didn't convert me, an eight-minute pop operatic piece about the evolution debate definitely won't.
Kesha: Rainbow (RCA)
In the unenviable position of being forced to basically record music within a hostage situation, pop star Kesha files a record under some illusion of ambition and individuality. If she is happy with it, then it's a triumph, but to these ears it's a weak and anonymous pop album with too many hands in it for the first half, and one that suffers from canned humor and enthusiasm in the second. During her grossly unfair legal battle -- I know this is the world women have lived in for years and I sound like I just fell off the turnip truck, but how does sexual harassment not constitute a breach of contract? -- it used to seem like Kesha felt compromised by the image foisted upon her, and the way her enthusiasm in her singing shoots upward during the surprisingly credible country numbers ("Hunt You Down" and the Dolly Parton duet "Old Flames") heavily implies that she's no more comfortable today with the artificial teenage grooviness of something like "Boogie Feet" (which gets an inexplicable assist from Eagles of Death Metal). Miley Cyrus sounded comfortable with such phoniness because she was and is a born phony. Available evidence suggests Kesha is a lot better than the music she releases implies, and you end up wondering how safe she really is being herself. The only solo compositions are the angry one that opens the piece and the one that's "influenced by Pet Sounds"; that one's produced by none other than Ben Folds. It's not my place to give advice but I just hope she's really, really careful about getting swarmed upon by another unnecessary and dubious self-appointed mentor.
Dent May: Across the Multiverse (Carpark) [c]
While trying to convey to my wife how annoying and depressing this album is I played her cuts from May's first two albums, and it surprised even me how much more vital Do Things was than this lethargic mess of recycled power pop hooks, flattened wholly by the sterile tin can production of which he's grown increasingly fond. He's never been a bad songwriter and he still isn't, and his voice is nothing if not appealingly unusual, but he keeps getting caught up in this same dumb morass of directionless sugar.
Grizzly Bear: Painted Ruins (RCA)
This will be a retread of my recent Fleet Foxes writeup. We've reached the outer limits of what I can say about this kind of music. If you like Grizzly Bear, it sounds like you would like it; it has expansive production and seems to subtly expand their palette of instrumentation. Meanwhile I hate them, but I harbor them no ill will, and it doesn't do the world any good for me to go beyond that.
***
ALSO (OR RATHER, SOLELY) RECOMMENDED:
- This Is the Kit: Moonshine Freeze (Rough Trade) - pleasant and shimmery, a rainy night AM blissout ["Two Pence Piece"]
- Dizzee Rascal: Raskit (Universal) - both impressive and terrifying how little the years seem to have mellowed him out; lovely '90s MTV feeling here though
- Jupiter & Okwess: Kin Sonic (Glitterbeat) - the Congo's past linked to a universal present
- Nicole Atkins: Goodnight Rhonda Lee (Single Lock) - car wheels on a gravel road ["Darkness Falls So Quiet"]
RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES:
- Floating Points: Reflections - Mojave Desert (Pluto)
- Golden Retriever: Rotations (Thrill Jockey)
ORPHAN TUNES:
Mura Masa ft. Bonzai "Nuggets" [Mura Masa]
Lana Del Rey "Love" [Lust for Life]
***
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME
Girl Ray: Earl Grey
David Rawlings: Poor David's Almanack
Liane Carroll: The Right to Love
REJECTS
[Due to a Notepad-related disaster, I lost my notes for the last several of these, so some of them probably should have Not You It's Me tags. Sorry.]
Bedouine [NYIM]
James Elkington: Wintres Woma [NYIM]
Public Service Broadcasting: Every Valley
Mura Masa
Lana Del Rey: Lust for Life
The Chris Robinson Brotherhood: Barefoot in the Head
Stanton Moore: With You in Mind [NYIM]
Alice Cooper: Paranormal
Nick Heyward: Woodland Echoes [NYIM]
The Districts: Popular Manipulations
Paul Kelly: Life Is Fine
Oneohtrix Point Never: Good Time OST [no one alive has done enough drugs to listen to this]
Frankie Rose: Cage Tropical
Downtown Boys: Cost of Living
Rat Boy: Scum
So Much Light: Oh, Yuck
Judy Dyble: Summer Dancing
Shelby Lynne: Not Dark Yet
Ghostpoet: Dark Days + Canapes
Steven Wilson: To the Bone
***
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Saturday, October 7, 2017
The future of ratkind: July 2017 music diary
Laurel Halo: Dust (Hyperdub) [hr]Squeaking and tweaking and bubbling like a higher-tech tUnE-yArDs, Halo is an electronic producer operating from Berlin via Ann Arbor; this is her third album, and its mood is already infectious before she starts delivering immediate, maddening earworms like "Moontalk" and "Do U Ever Happen." Like Jlin's record from a few months ago, it's the sound of addictive unrest -- all the experimentation of Arca or Oneohtrix but sliding ever so subtly into pop form, which in turn brings you back, which in turn makes the itch come back harder. Not since Crystal Castles broke through has such superficially annoying music become so lifestyle-indispensable so quickly.
Vince Staples: Big Fish Theory (Def Jam) [hr]Minority opinion, but I've long felt like Staples was a talent being held back by something -- restraint? heart? formalism? a preference for midtempo? who knows -- and outside of some explosive tracks, and some I eventually warmed to when they became popular, I felt distant from his material. His second album doesn't just redeem anything ordinary in his back catalog, it sets fire to nearly everything else out right now, within and outside of the hip hop frame. With production dominated by Zack Sekoff but easing freely through tracks from GTA, Sophie and others, the record's beats are a showcase for cutting edge electronic and avant garde, as forward-looking and alien-sounding in its fashion as Yeezus or Atrocity Exhibition despite cues from Burial and classic house. You don't really need to know or recognize any of this to notice that nothing else sounds like this right now, and also that Staples harnesses this energy to deliver magnetic, overwhelming hooks and too many engaging moments of outright pop brilliance to count. Top-dollar guests are everywhere, many of them bigger stars than Staples, one of them inexplicably Damon Albarn, but the drama and the quickness all come from the leader himself. The absolutely infectious "Big Fish" should be the biggest song in the country, but then "BagBak" shoulda been too, with its outstanding closing fuck-off to the one percent, the government and the president, and for its lyrical synthesis of Staples' Afrofuturism: "Prison system broken, racial war commotion / Until the president get ashy, Vincent won't be votin' / We need Tamikas and Shaniquas in that Oval Office / Obama ain't enough for me, we only getting started," and maybe especially for the clear-as-a-bell, thrown off verse line "clap your hands if the police ever profiled," and the hint -- however Utopian -- of economic revenge, so much more profound than Jay-Z's because it's so much less polite and has the ring of underground organization. But every one of these mean creations is terrific; at 36 minutes, there's never time for a letup and it's hard to even breathlessly point out highlights, though "745" and the magical tin can "Yeah Right" will stick in your head first. All the while Staples lays down the gauntlet on race, America, class, suicide and sex in 2017, his sharpness and wickedness here fully matched by equally fearless musical choices.
Algiers: The Underside of Power (Matador) [c]
Atlanta "psychedelic soul" band claims to be post-punk but sounds more like Queens of the Stone Age, only more tired yet.
Peter Perrett: How the West Was Won (Domino) [r]
Probably my most anticipated album of the year save Kelela's, and despite the rating, better than I honestly expected. As leader of one of the most wonderful British bands of the '70s and '80s, the Only Ones, Perrett laid down an irresistibly erudite, sensitive vocal and lyrical style that made you feel he was one of the few songwriters with an actual empathy for, and feel for the problems of, human beings; whether his subject was a lost cat or the frenzied mania of real love, his songs rivaled the cleverness and humor of Ray Davies and Paul Westerberg with what sometimes seemed like an even stronger literary approach to genuine emotion. Seldom was a word wasted, and his vocal inflections and melodies operated in close conjunction, the songs never struggling to fit the words or vice versa; the thing is, he never ever got credit for any of this, his band getting buried in narratives about punk and new wave, has apparently spent the last thirty-odd years getting high on self-destruction with his wife, "flirting with death" in perpetuity. 2017 brings his first proper solo record, and you notice two things immediately: his voice is undimmed, and you can't even believe it's not 1979 when he starts singing. Secondly, the first song is pretty horrendous, like one of Loudon Wainwright's extended treatises on Viagra or whatnot. It gradually improves from there, though (even the polyamory song isn't that bad, not least because Perrett could breathe from ashtrays for the rest of his life and never be as disgusting as David Crosby), and Perrett's guitar playing is better than ever, almost Tom Verlaine-like at its best (listen to "Something in My Brain"). And there are at least two songs, "Sweet Endeavour" and "C Voyeurger," that are good enough to be on an Only Ones record, and that's honestly enough for me to count this an unexpected success.
MIKE: May God Bless Your Hustle (s/r)
NYC rapper with a somewhat repetitive verse style that drowns out whatever stunning lyrics others are hearing (though I am partial to the sentiment "I got this fuckin' headache / and it fuckin' hurt"), but he gets a nod for discussing mental health straightforwardly, and the genuinely oddball production choices and strange sonic interludes, on top of conventional soul samples, keep things from getting too tired. The juxtaposition sometimes calls up memories of Cities Aviv.
Jay-Z: 4:44 (Roc Nation) [c]
Self-absorption can generate art, but it has its limits and Kanye West has already fully explored them in this era and genre. Meanwhile, Jay's own personal Downfall of Western Civilization continues with his completely unnecessary "answer record" to Beyoncé's Lemonade, presumably recorded between board meetings, with producer No ID all too willingly enabling the onetime titan's clinging to the past of lush Blueprint-lite soul samples and to a generally desperate rotten-to-the-core nostalgia for a long-outmoded cultural dominance. Well, we're all getting older, but "y'all think small, I think Biggie" is a reach, and "I would say I'm the realest nigga rappin', but that ain't even a statement, that's like sayin' I'm the tallest midget -- wait, that ain't politically correct" is a dumb joke unworthy of a skit on a Big Boi release, made dumber yet because it's completely sincere. And enough about renewed energy, check out these hot rhymes: "I bought some artwork for one million / Two years later, that shit worth two million" or "Mama had four kids, but she's a lesbian / had to pretend so long that she's a thespian" (which, okay, I get that it's a crucial gesture for him personally, but the expiration date on that particular couplet was probably 1985). It's not all embarrassing, but a lot of it is, like the worst part of the otherwise far more inspired Lemonade -- the "Black Bill Gates" capitalist fantasyland -- expanded into a worldview, with sentimental odes to friendships with superstars predicated on who gets the streaming rights to their catalogs, and the record's careful exposure rolled out in listening parties at Sprint stores, and an entire song about who gets what part of the corporate holdings in Jay's will. It's telling that the record's best moment by far is Jay's tail-between-legs confessional title cut, as if marital woes are his only remembered connection to reality. I truly do hope those two millionaires work it out.
Broken Social Scene: Hug of Thunder (Arts & Crafts) [r]
The legend goes that only a few people (who weren't in media) bought Broken Social Scene records at their height but every one of them is now in middle management. I can't tell you how tempting it is to rate this higher than it probably deserves. Unlike the good but sluggish Forgiveness Rock Record, this brings back the classic sound of Kevin Drew and his large cohort, and if you've not listened in a while you may have forgotten how much their expansive, detailed sound predicted the Arcade Fire phenomenon, for example. But unlike fellow Canadian supergroup the New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene's sound has become quaint, tied completely with nostalgia for a college rock culture that rescinded its domination quite quickly; and hey, it's not like Arcade Fire is doing a whole lot better lately. Still, if you want to pretend it's 2003-05 and so much still lay ahead, a time when I and everyone else with a taste for this kind of whatever this is played You Forgot It in People and its followup until we memorized every cranny and nuance, this is a bargain in terms of expanding a tiny catalog with more-of-the-wonderfully-same. It couldn't sound more correct or glorious while it's on, but its biggest cultural contribution to the world is letting Leslie Feist sing a few times. I'm not saying the music is irrelevant, I'm saying you'll only understand why it's so beautiful if you knew it way back when.
Japanese Breakfast: Soft Sounds from Another Planet (Dead Oceans)
Pseudonym of Oregonian multi-instrumentalist lo-fi popster Michelle Zauner, whose work boasts a broadly theatrical sound bordering on dreampop. It sounds nice and means well, but it's an odd choice to hype up and you can get your fix for this in many places, this just as well as any. Sounds like the back end of a Chromatics album at its best.
Sheer Mag: Need to Feel Your Love (Revolver) [hr]Riff-heavy, musically omnivorous power pop quintet came screaming out of Philly in 2016 with a set of three scarring, relentless EPs comprised of some of the filthiest and best American rock & roll in years, led unforgettably by the booming-voiced, unstoppable Tina Halladay and with lead guitarist Kyle Seely joining Max Kakacek to bring back that tasty Elliot Easton-Alex Chilton shit with plenty of Led Zeppelin and Boston and other dinosaur bands in tow, without the sneering machismo or self-indulgence. Their debut full-length takes a surprisingly nuanced approach compared to the punch-to-the-gut of the seven-inches, but after a time this ends up serving not to dilute their sound but to demonstrate an expanded, eclectic range of capabilities. With their revolutionary rhetoric and solid mixture of stubbornness and elasticity in their commercial aspirations, they could be the rare band that comes out swinging and doesn't immediately start to stagnate, especially since the record reveals few limitations to their sound, fewer yet to Halladay's once-in-a-lifetime presence and versatility. A band whose absorption of classic rock/AOR, glam, new wave, punk and even traces of metal already offered a nearly utopian synthesis on III proves equally capable of interpreting funk, disco, power balladry ("Milk and Honey" is Saints-worthy); even if the timely protest celebration "Meet Me in the Street" and political admonition "Expect the Bayonet" make the grandest possible statements, the shocking directness and fearless vulnerability of the title cut, the interlocking groove and infectious midtempo stomp of "Suffer Me," and the undeniable pop bliss of "Pure Desire" -- goddamn, that chorus! -- keep you running back to this irresistible broken-speaker sound, and you remember what felt so fleetingly good about hanging around in those seedy bars way back whenever or late last night.
Shabazz Palaces: Quazarz vs. the Jealous Machines (Sub Pop) [r]Shabazz Palaces: Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star (Sub Pop) [hr]
Ishmael Butler bombards us with two new records simultaneously, and the first -- engaging though it is -- is something of a retread, more sci-fi tomfoolery in a concept record about an alien exploring the ghost in the machine, observing the haters, getting mad about narcissism, etc., and Butler really does sound pretty pissed off in places when the poetry slam absurdity of it, not to mention a beatless gloom that's altogether new, doesn't totally drown him out. The second record is another story; intended as a set of bonus tracks it grew out into its own full-fledged experience and, like Kendrick Lamar's set of To Pimp a Butterfly leftovers untitled unmastered., it sounds rawer, looser, more engaged than the sessions that birthed the idea. The malfunctioning Atari sounds of "Julian's Dream" and the scathing culture critique "30 Clip Extension" on the first album give the best clues to what's going on during the second, which allows Butler to come out from behind concept and really spit: the unsettling rhythms and chants of "Eel Dreams" and "Fine Ass Hairdresser" have all the spontaneity missing when the impulse toward plot overtakes songs, "Shine a Light" is a sample-heavy production and performance to die for, possibly the best synthesis of the Shabazz ethos thus far, and "Moon Whip Quaz" is just irresistible... while the second record's ambient interludes and hooks both linger to a greater degree than anything since Black Up. It feels like the two albums would have greater impact if they were fused, but Butler so clearly knows what he's doing musically it's no fun to try to question his artistic or business acumen.
Waxahatchee: Out in the Storn (Merge) [r]
Same as it ever was, a flawless soundtrack to eternal adolescence, or at least hazy memories of same.
Tyler, the Creator: Flower Boy (Columbia) [r]
(Pretending you don't already know this:) Tyler's part of the Odd Future alt-hip hop collective of essentially teenagers who hit the big time as bloghypes and then a mainstream phenomenon starting around 2011, at which time their attempt at an Insane Close Posse-style cultish fanbase with a DIY ethos and alternately absurdist, misogynist and just plain stupid humor reached its brief zenith, meaning there was a lot of talk about "the zeitgeist" and a lot of people getting (understandably, for the most part) offended. This already feels like ancient history, and already had begun to by the time the collective's first real breakout superstar Frank Ocean started getting fawned over by normies the world over in '12 -- when he started his balladeering move, the guilt-by-association evidently faded. One of the decisive moments in Ocean's public life was when he came out as bisexual, and some years later Tyler -- author of most of the more divisive and troubling lyrics that got Odd Future so much attention in the first place, many of them homophobic -- has done the same in album form with this confessional charmer that rides on the back of Chance the Rapper's last few releases with its Yellow Submarine-PM Dawn graphics and vibes. Truthfully, its ambitions don't seem far removed from Tyler's initial plan post-Goblin -- "Talking about rape and cutting bodies up, it just doesn't interest me anymore... what interests me is making weird hippie music for people to get high to." hmm, okay -- but it's getting loads of goodwill now that Chance has made its brand of introspection somewhat fashionable, and it no-shit remains extremely impressive that Tyler produces all of his own material; when you hear the variance of sound on this release, that's mind-blowing, though if I'm being honest this is also the first time I've been able to make it all the way through one of his records, which I thought in 2011 and still think today is partially generational -- go ask the Needle Drop asshole what he thinks I guess* -- and partially resentment that Odd Future received a level of attention that the vastly more provocative and witty Das Racist never did (if DR was the Sex Pistols, Odd Future is the damn Knack). I do like this; Tyler's an engaging and versatile rapper, the lyrics are fair enough, and the three-track run from "Boredom" to "911" is a mood-swinging blast, and a return to the groove-based sound of early Kanye West is more immediately appealing to me (except when No ID is trying it) than the perhaps artistically riskier exploration of gospel and pop tones on Coloring Book, but as with that record I have to tell you that I find the positivity at least a little hollow, and maybe in this case even a tiny bit self-serving, considering how much the attention paid to Tyler has fallen off with each successive record until now. "November" and "Glitter" are sweet, good-hearted songs, and they're also almost tooth-decayingly corny, painting him as a passive-aggressive reactionary in reverse. But if someone finds empowerment here, they fully deserve it, and I know young people need space to figure shit out and cynicism isn't helpful here... but can you really 100% tell which Tyler is the trustworthy confessor and which the pandering crook?
* = oops, the Needle Drop guy is only two years younger than me, oh well, throwing myself into the ditch now
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
- Beach Fossils: Somersault (Bayonet)- jangling into a dark night, and with a streak of genre-bending riskiness to boot; too bad the singing is almost wholly colorless
- Chuck Berry: Chuck (Dualtone) - more an odds and ends gathering than a proper return, overrun with novelty like most of his studio albums, but his first stab at new material in almost thirty years is more charming than not, and his refusal to accept he had nothing left to prove rings out hard and true ["Big Boys" / "Wonderful Woman"]
- The Heliocentrics: A World of Masks (Soundway) - starts slow but gets hypnotic, the less singing the better
- Sufjan Stevens/Bryce Dessner/Nico Muhly/James McAlister: Planetarium (4AD) - like Sufjan? you'll like this, but you'll listen to it start to finish maybe twice in your life
- Alison Moyet: Other (Cooking Vinyl) - no standout songs but Moyet's voice is an earth-shattering thrill, now as always
- Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar (Virgin) - all-timer indie rock diva discovers the joy of florid full arrangements, retains her infallible voice on some terrific throwback stuff ["In and Out" / "Do You Want Me To"]
- TOPS: Sugar at the Gate (Arbutus) - lilting soft rock with a '90s trip hop edge like Flock of Dimes, though not nearly as good
- Amber Coffman: City of No Reply (Columbia) - soulful, melodic, well-produced pop from -- of all people -- the former ex-Dirty Projectors guitarist; starts out truly brilliantly with three of the best songs of the year ["All to Myself" / "Dark Night" / "Nobody Knows"]
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* This Is the Kit: Moonshine Freeze
* Dizzee Rascal: Raskit
Bedouine
Floating Points: Reflections - Mojave Desert
James Elkington: Wintres Woma
Jupiter & Okwess: Kin Sonic
Public Service Broadcasting: Every Valley
Mura Masa
Lana Del Rey: Lust for Life
The Chris Robinson Brotherhood: Barefoot in the Head
Nicole Atkins: Goodnight Rhonda Lee
Stanton Moore: With You in Mind
Golden Retriever: Rotations
REJECTS:
House and Land [NYIM]
Phoenix: Ti Amo
Big Boi: Boomiverse
Rozwell Kid: Precious Art
Denai Moore: We Used to Bloom [NYIM]
Jeff Tweedy: Together at Last
Lapalux: Rulnism
Washed Out: Mister Mellow
HAIM: Something to Tell You
Boris: Dear
Offa Rex: The Queen of Hearts
Declan McKenna: What Do You Think About the Car?
Daphni: Fabriclive 93 [NYIM]
Childhood: Universal High
Pete Fij: We Are Millionaires [NYIM]
OLD RECORDS RATED (NOT REVIEWED) THIS MONTH
B.B. King: Live in Cook County Jail (ABC 1970/1971) [r]
various artists: At Home with the Groovebox (Grand Royal 2000) [-] {the Pavement song is magnificent}
Saturday, September 9, 2017
I got my hands full all summer long: June 2017 music diary
My stepdad, who I loved very much, died on August 27th. For some time thereafter I put all the energy I had into being with and helping my mom (with my wife by my side at every turn), and with planning and speaking at his memorial service a week later. It was an experience I won't get over for a long time. Meanwhile I don't much want to talk about it, but I've found it therapeutic these past few days to go back to writing, preferably about anything petty and frivolous, album reviews for instance. The first two reviews below were written before he passed; you'll probably notice that I sound more impatient after a certain point, and I do apologize, and yet also I don't, because so what. I can't promise I put my heart and soul into this but it did help to focus on something else, and on stuff that does mean a lot to me, but perspective like this does make you wonder what the point is of writing about music that was never gonna speak to you in the first place. Maybe I had some anger to get out too. I dunno. Thank you for your patience.
Incidentally, Mom tasked me with choosing the music for Chris' funeral and she had some mandatory selections; I added stuff I knew he loved -- Prince, the Stones, the Animals, Chuck Berry (he's the one who gave me Berry's autobiography, which I read and greatly enjoyed recently), B.B. King, Johnny Cash singing "Amazing Grace" and "Oh What a Dream," "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M. -- and she only vetoed one of my choices, "Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters, which probably was too naughty anyway. But I editorialized with one song and one song only, "Louisiana" by the Walkmen. So far as I know Chris never heard the Walkmen and he had no special ties to Louisiana -- he and Mom went there and loved it, but nothing beyond that -- but I got some strange urge to hear it and everything about the music, Hamilton Leithauser's vocal, and the lyrics seemed to me improbably, almost superstitiously perfect, especially the bridge just before the horns come in. I can't hear those words without picturing him working on the land he'd bought that he enjoyed so much, invariably followed by cats, goats, chickens and roosters, and sometimes us. I never knew anyone who was interested in so much, and filled his time so well, and on top of all the times he bailed me out of various jams, he was a boundless inspiration to me. My wife and my mom and I will all miss him terribly, but I kind of love that "Louisiana," the song, will now always be about him for me.
***
Chastity Belt: I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone (Hardly Art) [hr]
For a band whose best song is called "Drone," Chastity Belt's music historically hasn't exactly been a dour affair; from that song's priceless chorus of "he was just another man tryin' to teach me something" to the same album's anthems about jokes and sluttiness, their work was marked by equal parts defiance and good humor. You might expect their first post-Trump release to double down, but this instead is the sound of defeat, regret, even resignation. Julia Shapiro's lyrics are now about anxiety and isolation, but what's more telling is that in varying their music only by a matter of degrees -- it's still a beautiful wall of jangling post-punk guitars, tempered by lilting, unpredictable melodies and subtle propulsion -- they generate a sophisticated portrait of malaise and dread that feels both like an exorcism and a source of comfort. More songs break out of the pattern than before; several of these are essentially pop ballads as driven by non-buried vocals as by guitars, but it's the guitars that seem to jab at the gut the hardest, the muffled riff on "It's Obvious" articulating the track's bottom-heavy despair, and the floating ballad "What the Hell" capturing the album's lethargic mood perfectly in its beautiful licks. And the maturity on "Caught in a Lie," which asks what good truth brings and, in its towering chorus, "Is this what you want?" defines the album's mixture of sonic bliss with personal agony perfectly. This kind of lateral movement and emotional expansion is what separates a long-lived band from the pack, and it's thrilling how much this builds on its predecessor Time to Go Home, while taking completely unexpected avenues to do so. I just hope we all survive this, but in the meantime, it's quite moving to hear someone openly proclaim with full-throated intensity that they're not OK.
Saint Etienne: Home Counties (Heavenly) [hr]
Almost no band could follow up an album as wonderful and singular as Words and Music without delivering disappointment on some level, but when you view Home Counties as an enhancement of that record's concept, approaching the past and future through the cultural touchstones and personal histories we define for ourselves, it becomes equally moving in its modest fashion, and musically its warmth and variance are in character and unfailingly inviting. This is a chronicle of suburban life outside London -- its speed, its grace, its radio -- but one needs little familiarity with the area to appreciate its mixture of nostalgia and lament. In contrast to the sharp dance floor tones of the prior record, Sarah Cracknell et al. approach each of the proper songs here differently, from orchestral modern-ish pop-rock to bouncing synthpop ("Magpie Eyes") to disco ("Dive," demonstrating how adept Cracknell is at full costume) to pure hook-filled bliss ("Out of My Mind") to cultural manifestos ("Truck Drivers in Eyeliner"). And on the ballad "Take It All In" and sprightly "Underneath the Apple Tree," you can almost hear the music bouncing off the walls of some recommissioned warehouse for an impromptu Northern Soul sock hop circa whenever. It's a long album with a lot to say -- eloquently, as ever -- and a lot of short ambient pieces and side roads, but it also has much to reveal, nearly all of it rewarding. Mostly this is the sort of group, like Pet Shop Boys or Yo La Tengo, with whom it's just an unerring pleasure to spend an hour.
Big Thief: Capacity (Saddle Creek) [r]
Brooklyn band, led by Adrianne Lenker, has hushed and hypnotic, still and distant songs that are almost too sweet and candy coated, but a feeling of peace doesn't seem like a bad thing right now.
Lorde: Melodrama (Republic)
When Auckland's Lorde hit the big time with Pure Heroine in 2013 I was polite and didn't say anything, and luckily the album slipped through my various filters for one reason or another, but I'll tell you now that I didn't get it. I still don't. She seems fine but the hype for "Royals" baffled me and nothing on here has a shred of personality I can detect beyond the usual trend-mongering that bizarrely impresses the poptimist set. Good for her for making the Forbes young turks list or whatever, but generally speaking everyone who makes this kind of music except maybe Tegan & Sara and Carly Rae Jepsen sounds like a cop to me.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: The Nashville Sound (Thirty Tigers)
I'm enough of a square that when I got into alt-country the first thing I bought was an Old 97's greatest hits CD, not any of the albums, and I have to say that the fact that the liner notes included a form to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center made me like them even more; thereafter, Old Crow Medicine Show and Chatham County Line and (years hence) Drive-By Truckers issuing songs explicitly honoring the Civil Rights Movement meant a lot to me as a southern leftist, which may sound sentimental, empty and stupid, but if you're not around here -- even in a relatively diverse, well-integrated area like mine -- you don't realize how much of a comfort it is when white redneck types explicitly reject our racist heritage. Still, those bands mostly sang about the same stuff Hank Williams sang about, which is what set them apart and gave them the "alt" tag; until alt-country itself became a trend, they didn't seem particularly beholden to the Flavor of the Month sheen and anonymity that drives most actual Nashville records today. Meanwhile, Isbell and his crew's songs all seem like emphatically PC, overly choreographed anthems of white male guilt, and while it's a good thing he isn't defensive like Ben Folds, eventually that earnestness wears thin and grows terribly dull, not least because if being one of the Good Dudes is all you ever sing about, it seems... well... suspicious. Points for a song about depression that doesn't gloss over its ravages and randomness at all, though, but even that is cold comfort in the month that gave us Chastity Belt's "Complain."
Songhoy Blues: Resistance (Fat Possum) [hr]
Like a lot of African music that manages to get ink in the U.S., this terrific Malian band's work could be labeled as "westernized" -- and their associations with Blur and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs likely don't help, though a blood relation to Ali Farka Touré is more telling -- but that would be missing the point as surely as accusing Talking Heads or Vampire Weekend or tUnE-yArDs of appropriation is. Fuck it, this quartet's "desert blues" is rock & roll -- guitars that scream, words that jumble delightfully, body-music beats that leap out and wound -- and as long as this record's on, your sense of history just ceases and you're faced with the complete border-crossing timelessness of music like this. They cite American R&B, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles as influences, but they sound like a revolution. They further the image of post-jihadist Mali as one of the world's greatest hotbeds of musical invention. They won't be ignored.
Kevin Morby: City Music (Dead Oceans)
It's a depressed Mac DeMarco -- slightly less smarmy and a bit prettier but still. If you were friends with him or something you'd probably think he was a genius. You can copy/paste my review of the last album, only that time I complained about Father John Misty instead, but I figured you'd like a change of pace.
Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up (Nonesuch) [c]
One of the many late 2000s indie prog bands that caught fire and acclaim for a brief moment (Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, etc.) before rapidly becoming a quaint symbol of a dead movement, which -- for me at least -- has made it harder to be mad at them, except when their music is offensively bad like the Projectors'. So yeah, this is insipid crap that takes all of its Brian Wilson cues from the most annoying music he made in his prime years, and it sounds like Art Garfunkel decided to take acid and join the Moody Blues, but it's not worth the trouble of really hating it. Its biggest departure from earlier Fleet Foxes material is the near-total absence of hooks, and it's obviously a bit better when Robin Pecknold puts a bit of muscle behind his singing, or when the production and compositions aren't quite so soppy or fussy (see "Third of May" for an example). I know that in the streaming era we're supposed to just let the fans of this kind of overblown pretension review it on their own personal curve and I should just shut up, and soon I won't bother with this sort of thing, but for now: yeah, this sucks.
SZA: CTRL (RCA)
Lest you forget that popular radio is pretty dismal these days, the pampered debut of Solána Imani Rowe -- heretofore best known as writer of several tracks for Rihanna and Beyoncé -- is a chillwave and neo-soul blender, full of sound and fury and all of it bland, finding time for a whole album's worth of half-baked pop hooks and the worst Kendrick Lamar verse in the history of the world. Could alt-R&B be wearing out its welcome this quickly? For me at least, the empty empowerment anthem-emitting and excessively groomed stature of even a talented artist like this feels hollow and wasteful; that might be generational. It might be me feeling sick to death of poptimism. It might just be my love of the weird overtaking me after thinking for just a little while in this decade that the stuff teens like or that's on the radio might be OK. I don't want to be condescending here, but I'd love to understand how one gets excited about this or Lorde; it's nice when someone breaks through the sausage fest that now overwhelms the pop charts, but that alone just isn't fucking enough for me.
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
- Sylvan Esso: What Now (Loma Vista) ["Die Young" / "Radio"]
- Paramore: After Laughter (Atlantic): once adored Tennessean alt-rockers' initial ebullience here, such a miracle you squint, is finally weighed down, but hey, there's a poiuyt on the front! ["Hard Times" / "Rose-Colored Boy"]
- Trombone Shorty: Parking Lot Symphony (Blue Note): lifestyle music and idgaf, it sounds fantastic played loud
- Blondie: Pollinator (BMG): a deepened snarl and some of Debbie Harry's most expressive singing, the writing from an array of guests impressively sharp and dark even at its most layered
- Don Bryant: Don't Give Up on Love (Fat Possum): wrote songs for the "5" Royales, Ann Peebles and Al Green, and a whole history of good times and hard dues spills out of his delightful voice on this Tapestry-like excavation of beach music past, living the high life at 75 like the generations haven't passed onward
- Juana Molino: Halo (Crammed Discs): Argentine experimenter unsettles with her ambitious clash of warmth, avant and electro; I honestly wish the new xx sounded like this
ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES:
- Ryuichi Sakamoto: async (Milan)
- Forest Swords: Compassion (Ninja Tune)
- Do Make Say Think: Stubborn Persistent Illusions (Constellation)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Beach Fossils: Somersault
* Chuck Berry: Chuck
* House and Land
The Heliocentrics: A World of Masks
TOPS: Sugar at the Gate
Amber Coffman: City of No Reply
Sufjan Stevens et al.: Planetarium
Phoenix: Ti Amo
Alison Moyet: Other
Big Boi: Boomiverse
Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar
REJECTS:
Wilsen: I Go Missing in My Sleep [NYIM]
Mary J. Blige: Strength of a Woman [NYIM]
Jane Weaver: Modern Kosmology [NYIM]
Chastity Brown: Silhouette of Sirens [NYIM]
The Unthanks: Diversions Vol. 4
The Charlatans UK: Different Days [NYIM]
Justin Townes Earle: Kids in the Street
Pixx: The Age of Anxiety
Richard Dawson: Peasant [holy goddamn shit]
Dan Auerbach: Waiting on a Song
Roger Waters: Is This the Life We Really Want?
Thea Gilmore: The Counterweight
Marika Hackman: I'm Not Your Man
Anathema: The Optimist
Cigarettes After Sex [NYIM]
The Drums: Abysmal Thoughts
Steve Earle & the Dukes: So You Wannabe an Outlaw
Ride: Weather Diaries
***
Believe it or not, I actually got this post done very quickly; the delay is because for about two weeks, I wasn't working on anything, and also because I felt guilty about the Lorde and SZA reviews and kept putting them off. As alluded to above, I'm having a constant internal debate on giving up the reviewing of records that don't particularly interest me just because they pass a certain threshold of widespread attention -- I'm only doing it for me anyway, I realize, and why force it? -- but for now my stubbornness is requiring me to stick to the current plan through 2019. I may change my mind though.
Incidentally, Mom tasked me with choosing the music for Chris' funeral and she had some mandatory selections; I added stuff I knew he loved -- Prince, the Stones, the Animals, Chuck Berry (he's the one who gave me Berry's autobiography, which I read and greatly enjoyed recently), B.B. King, Johnny Cash singing "Amazing Grace" and "Oh What a Dream," "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M. -- and she only vetoed one of my choices, "Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters, which probably was too naughty anyway. But I editorialized with one song and one song only, "Louisiana" by the Walkmen. So far as I know Chris never heard the Walkmen and he had no special ties to Louisiana -- he and Mom went there and loved it, but nothing beyond that -- but I got some strange urge to hear it and everything about the music, Hamilton Leithauser's vocal, and the lyrics seemed to me improbably, almost superstitiously perfect, especially the bridge just before the horns come in. I can't hear those words without picturing him working on the land he'd bought that he enjoyed so much, invariably followed by cats, goats, chickens and roosters, and sometimes us. I never knew anyone who was interested in so much, and filled his time so well, and on top of all the times he bailed me out of various jams, he was a boundless inspiration to me. My wife and my mom and I will all miss him terribly, but I kind of love that "Louisiana," the song, will now always be about him for me.
***
Chastity Belt: I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone (Hardly Art) [hr]For a band whose best song is called "Drone," Chastity Belt's music historically hasn't exactly been a dour affair; from that song's priceless chorus of "he was just another man tryin' to teach me something" to the same album's anthems about jokes and sluttiness, their work was marked by equal parts defiance and good humor. You might expect their first post-Trump release to double down, but this instead is the sound of defeat, regret, even resignation. Julia Shapiro's lyrics are now about anxiety and isolation, but what's more telling is that in varying their music only by a matter of degrees -- it's still a beautiful wall of jangling post-punk guitars, tempered by lilting, unpredictable melodies and subtle propulsion -- they generate a sophisticated portrait of malaise and dread that feels both like an exorcism and a source of comfort. More songs break out of the pattern than before; several of these are essentially pop ballads as driven by non-buried vocals as by guitars, but it's the guitars that seem to jab at the gut the hardest, the muffled riff on "It's Obvious" articulating the track's bottom-heavy despair, and the floating ballad "What the Hell" capturing the album's lethargic mood perfectly in its beautiful licks. And the maturity on "Caught in a Lie," which asks what good truth brings and, in its towering chorus, "Is this what you want?" defines the album's mixture of sonic bliss with personal agony perfectly. This kind of lateral movement and emotional expansion is what separates a long-lived band from the pack, and it's thrilling how much this builds on its predecessor Time to Go Home, while taking completely unexpected avenues to do so. I just hope we all survive this, but in the meantime, it's quite moving to hear someone openly proclaim with full-throated intensity that they're not OK.
Saint Etienne: Home Counties (Heavenly) [hr]Almost no band could follow up an album as wonderful and singular as Words and Music without delivering disappointment on some level, but when you view Home Counties as an enhancement of that record's concept, approaching the past and future through the cultural touchstones and personal histories we define for ourselves, it becomes equally moving in its modest fashion, and musically its warmth and variance are in character and unfailingly inviting. This is a chronicle of suburban life outside London -- its speed, its grace, its radio -- but one needs little familiarity with the area to appreciate its mixture of nostalgia and lament. In contrast to the sharp dance floor tones of the prior record, Sarah Cracknell et al. approach each of the proper songs here differently, from orchestral modern-ish pop-rock to bouncing synthpop ("Magpie Eyes") to disco ("Dive," demonstrating how adept Cracknell is at full costume) to pure hook-filled bliss ("Out of My Mind") to cultural manifestos ("Truck Drivers in Eyeliner"). And on the ballad "Take It All In" and sprightly "Underneath the Apple Tree," you can almost hear the music bouncing off the walls of some recommissioned warehouse for an impromptu Northern Soul sock hop circa whenever. It's a long album with a lot to say -- eloquently, as ever -- and a lot of short ambient pieces and side roads, but it also has much to reveal, nearly all of it rewarding. Mostly this is the sort of group, like Pet Shop Boys or Yo La Tengo, with whom it's just an unerring pleasure to spend an hour.
Big Thief: Capacity (Saddle Creek) [r]
Brooklyn band, led by Adrianne Lenker, has hushed and hypnotic, still and distant songs that are almost too sweet and candy coated, but a feeling of peace doesn't seem like a bad thing right now.
Lorde: Melodrama (Republic)
When Auckland's Lorde hit the big time with Pure Heroine in 2013 I was polite and didn't say anything, and luckily the album slipped through my various filters for one reason or another, but I'll tell you now that I didn't get it. I still don't. She seems fine but the hype for "Royals" baffled me and nothing on here has a shred of personality I can detect beyond the usual trend-mongering that bizarrely impresses the poptimist set. Good for her for making the Forbes young turks list or whatever, but generally speaking everyone who makes this kind of music except maybe Tegan & Sara and Carly Rae Jepsen sounds like a cop to me.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: The Nashville Sound (Thirty Tigers)
I'm enough of a square that when I got into alt-country the first thing I bought was an Old 97's greatest hits CD, not any of the albums, and I have to say that the fact that the liner notes included a form to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center made me like them even more; thereafter, Old Crow Medicine Show and Chatham County Line and (years hence) Drive-By Truckers issuing songs explicitly honoring the Civil Rights Movement meant a lot to me as a southern leftist, which may sound sentimental, empty and stupid, but if you're not around here -- even in a relatively diverse, well-integrated area like mine -- you don't realize how much of a comfort it is when white redneck types explicitly reject our racist heritage. Still, those bands mostly sang about the same stuff Hank Williams sang about, which is what set them apart and gave them the "alt" tag; until alt-country itself became a trend, they didn't seem particularly beholden to the Flavor of the Month sheen and anonymity that drives most actual Nashville records today. Meanwhile, Isbell and his crew's songs all seem like emphatically PC, overly choreographed anthems of white male guilt, and while it's a good thing he isn't defensive like Ben Folds, eventually that earnestness wears thin and grows terribly dull, not least because if being one of the Good Dudes is all you ever sing about, it seems... well... suspicious. Points for a song about depression that doesn't gloss over its ravages and randomness at all, though, but even that is cold comfort in the month that gave us Chastity Belt's "Complain."
Songhoy Blues: Resistance (Fat Possum) [hr]Like a lot of African music that manages to get ink in the U.S., this terrific Malian band's work could be labeled as "westernized" -- and their associations with Blur and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs likely don't help, though a blood relation to Ali Farka Touré is more telling -- but that would be missing the point as surely as accusing Talking Heads or Vampire Weekend or tUnE-yArDs of appropriation is. Fuck it, this quartet's "desert blues" is rock & roll -- guitars that scream, words that jumble delightfully, body-music beats that leap out and wound -- and as long as this record's on, your sense of history just ceases and you're faced with the complete border-crossing timelessness of music like this. They cite American R&B, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles as influences, but they sound like a revolution. They further the image of post-jihadist Mali as one of the world's greatest hotbeds of musical invention. They won't be ignored.
Kevin Morby: City Music (Dead Oceans)
It's a depressed Mac DeMarco -- slightly less smarmy and a bit prettier but still. If you were friends with him or something you'd probably think he was a genius. You can copy/paste my review of the last album, only that time I complained about Father John Misty instead, but I figured you'd like a change of pace.
Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up (Nonesuch) [c]
One of the many late 2000s indie prog bands that caught fire and acclaim for a brief moment (Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, etc.) before rapidly becoming a quaint symbol of a dead movement, which -- for me at least -- has made it harder to be mad at them, except when their music is offensively bad like the Projectors'. So yeah, this is insipid crap that takes all of its Brian Wilson cues from the most annoying music he made in his prime years, and it sounds like Art Garfunkel decided to take acid and join the Moody Blues, but it's not worth the trouble of really hating it. Its biggest departure from earlier Fleet Foxes material is the near-total absence of hooks, and it's obviously a bit better when Robin Pecknold puts a bit of muscle behind his singing, or when the production and compositions aren't quite so soppy or fussy (see "Third of May" for an example). I know that in the streaming era we're supposed to just let the fans of this kind of overblown pretension review it on their own personal curve and I should just shut up, and soon I won't bother with this sort of thing, but for now: yeah, this sucks.
SZA: CTRL (RCA)
Lest you forget that popular radio is pretty dismal these days, the pampered debut of Solána Imani Rowe -- heretofore best known as writer of several tracks for Rihanna and Beyoncé -- is a chillwave and neo-soul blender, full of sound and fury and all of it bland, finding time for a whole album's worth of half-baked pop hooks and the worst Kendrick Lamar verse in the history of the world. Could alt-R&B be wearing out its welcome this quickly? For me at least, the empty empowerment anthem-emitting and excessively groomed stature of even a talented artist like this feels hollow and wasteful; that might be generational. It might be me feeling sick to death of poptimism. It might just be my love of the weird overtaking me after thinking for just a little while in this decade that the stuff teens like or that's on the radio might be OK. I don't want to be condescending here, but I'd love to understand how one gets excited about this or Lorde; it's nice when someone breaks through the sausage fest that now overwhelms the pop charts, but that alone just isn't fucking enough for me.
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
- Sylvan Esso: What Now (Loma Vista) ["Die Young" / "Radio"]
- Paramore: After Laughter (Atlantic): once adored Tennessean alt-rockers' initial ebullience here, such a miracle you squint, is finally weighed down, but hey, there's a poiuyt on the front! ["Hard Times" / "Rose-Colored Boy"]
- Trombone Shorty: Parking Lot Symphony (Blue Note): lifestyle music and idgaf, it sounds fantastic played loud
- Blondie: Pollinator (BMG): a deepened snarl and some of Debbie Harry's most expressive singing, the writing from an array of guests impressively sharp and dark even at its most layered
- Don Bryant: Don't Give Up on Love (Fat Possum): wrote songs for the "5" Royales, Ann Peebles and Al Green, and a whole history of good times and hard dues spills out of his delightful voice on this Tapestry-like excavation of beach music past, living the high life at 75 like the generations haven't passed onward
- Juana Molino: Halo (Crammed Discs): Argentine experimenter unsettles with her ambitious clash of warmth, avant and electro; I honestly wish the new xx sounded like this
ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES:
- Ryuichi Sakamoto: async (Milan)
- Forest Swords: Compassion (Ninja Tune)
- Do Make Say Think: Stubborn Persistent Illusions (Constellation)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Beach Fossils: Somersault
* Chuck Berry: Chuck
* House and Land
The Heliocentrics: A World of Masks
TOPS: Sugar at the Gate
Amber Coffman: City of No Reply
Sufjan Stevens et al.: Planetarium
Phoenix: Ti Amo
Alison Moyet: Other
Big Boi: Boomiverse
Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar
REJECTS:
Wilsen: I Go Missing in My Sleep [NYIM]
Mary J. Blige: Strength of a Woman [NYIM]
Jane Weaver: Modern Kosmology [NYIM]
Chastity Brown: Silhouette of Sirens [NYIM]
The Unthanks: Diversions Vol. 4
The Charlatans UK: Different Days [NYIM]
Justin Townes Earle: Kids in the Street
Pixx: The Age of Anxiety
Richard Dawson: Peasant [holy goddamn shit]
Dan Auerbach: Waiting on a Song
Roger Waters: Is This the Life We Really Want?
Thea Gilmore: The Counterweight
Marika Hackman: I'm Not Your Man
Anathema: The Optimist
Cigarettes After Sex [NYIM]
The Drums: Abysmal Thoughts
Steve Earle & the Dukes: So You Wannabe an Outlaw
Ride: Weather Diaries
***
Believe it or not, I actually got this post done very quickly; the delay is because for about two weeks, I wasn't working on anything, and also because I felt guilty about the Lorde and SZA reviews and kept putting them off. As alluded to above, I'm having a constant internal debate on giving up the reviewing of records that don't particularly interest me just because they pass a certain threshold of widespread attention -- I'm only doing it for me anyway, I realize, and why force it? -- but for now my stubbornness is requiring me to stick to the current plan through 2019. I may change my mind though.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
The Beach Boys: 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow (1967)
(Capitol 2017)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Issued at an optimal moment in the summer of 2017, fifty years after the music embodying it was made, this overview of and new spin on the Beach Boys' creative output in 1967 is the best archival release credited to the band since The Pet Sounds Sessions; it may be less comprehensive than Capitol's Smile boxed set or the carefully compiled Becoming the Beach Boys, but in contrast to both of those sets this one compiles music that's consistently wonderful and exciting, in addition to being from a crucial moment in their creative genesis. Among other things, it puts the lie once and for all to the notion that Brian Wilson entered a period of creative surrender and retreat after his and the band's abandonment of the Smile project.
The compilation opens with, at long last, a complete stereo mix of Wild Honey, the last remaining Beach Boys album that had only been officially released in mono. As well documented here, most of Mark Linett's contemporary stereo mixes of Beach Boys music are poor substitutes for the original mono versions, surgically removing their sense of life in the interest of painstakingly separated elements and (at times) extraneous effects; they also are frequently missing key elements of the original finished records, which makes it irksome when stereo mixes find credibility as "canonical" within the band's discography. However, the two major exceptions are Linett's 1996 Pet Sounds mix and this new version of Wild Honey, a badly needed chance to hear this truly great album escape its muffled, muddy origins and come out to breathe. Bootlegs had long freely indicated that such a definitive mix was possible, and now it's available for all to hear. This isn't the place to again promote the view of Wild Honey as one of the greatest white-soul albums ever produced, but its unstoppable energy and spontaneity remain miraculous after all these decades, and while there are some scattered flaws in this new mix, this stereo edition richly deserves to be considered alongside the historical 1967 mix for a full portrait of these sessions, which offer such a winning example of Brian and Mike Love's easygoing collaborative skills as songwriters, and of Brian's undimmed genius as an arranger and producer.
Luckily, Sunshine Tomorrow provides us with even further evidence of this latter element with a host of outtakes, alternates and session materials that provide mainstream listeners a chance to hear Brian still as much in command of his band as he was of rooms full of Beach Boys and/or Wrecking Crew members a year or two earlier, and even bootleg aficionados will be hearing much of the provided material for the first time. A smattering of similar tracks corresponding to Smiley Smile, the prior record, is provided as well, and will be just as revelatory for many listeners. (Far more of the Smiley sessions were previously booted.) It's quite difficult to emphasize enough how much of a relief it is to hear the purposeful nature of the Beach Boys' late 1960s work validated so undeniably, and it's worth a perverse blessing to how much the record industry has changed, allowing releases like this that seemed impossible so recently to not only be prepared and printed but available widely, to anyone with an internet connection and a Spotify account. (Sunshine Tomorrow was released during a summer full of catalog and vault unloadings from artists as diverse as the Beatles, Prince and Radiohead, a situation that made it difficult to lament the collapse of a marketplace that would lead to a willingness to mine such material.)
The two discs are rounded out by some live material from November 1967 covering the Wild Honey period (it's wonderful if you can ignore Mike's obnoxious interjections), with "How She Boogalooed It" particularly fun on stage, and by -- at long last -- an official release of the incomplete Lei'd in Hawaii live album. For those unaware, this was initially meant to be Capitol's damage control move after the crash and burn of Smiley Smile: a hit-filled live album, but with a lineup change (Bruce out, Brian in) and a lack of rehearsal time, the recordings were considered unfit for release, which resulted in a hastily booked studio session that featured stripped-down, organ-driven versions of many of the Beach Boys' best songs. While there are some off-kilter and amateurish moments in the phony "set" that results (the version of "Sloop John B" is a disaster, with Dennis stumbling through his part after the bridge), there are just as many transcendent performances, and the laid-back, ethereal (some would say "stoned") vibe of the session is a perfect introduction to the Smiley-era Beach Boys sound. Without any audible strain, the quiet and beautiful variations on "God Only Knows," "Good Vibrations," "You're So Good to Me" and even "Help Me Rhonda," among others, reinterpret and enliven some of the loveliest songs in the band's catalog, with a couple of fine covers to boot. (The presence of "With a Little Help from My Friends" and "The Letter" as well as the excised tag from "I Was Made to Love Her" finally renders Capitol's 1983 LP Rarities wholly obsolete unless you desperately want to hear the weird sound effects laid onto "Bluebirds Over the Mountain.") As noted before, these simplified, elegant arrangements of "Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" (finally audible without the snide monologue that Brian wrote for Mike to read) would be a better fit for Smiley than the commercial singles.
With still space left at the end of disc two, this incredibly generous collection -- easily the new go-to way of experiencing the Beach Boys' messiest transitional year, surpassing the old Sea of Tunes boots -- offers some short live pieces from the actual Honolulu shows as well as some live cuts from Washington and Boston. As we knew from the Lei'd boots, these are mostly lackluster and uneventful, though it's fascinating to hear them try to win what sounds like a rowdy teenage crowd (the kids still wanted the hits in 1967 and let no one tell you otherwise) over with "Gettin' Hungry," in a performance that one doubts sold many audience members on the new Brian & Mike single. Lastly we get an expanded version of the "Surf's Up" Brian recorded impromptu while tuning his piano during the Wild Honey sessions; this already leaked out on the Made in California box, but it's more complete here with several false starts, and now you don't need to root through all the garbage on that set to get to it.
The only objection one can possibly have to this magnificent collection -- which works not just for historical interest but as a full-on listening experience, not true even of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper 50th anniversary expansion -- is that it's a pity we didn't get similar treatments of the 1965 albums Today! and Summer Days, forced to contend instead with multiple discs of Party! outtakes. At any rate, this is wonderful and given everything I've heard and heard about, I can't see how they could have made it a more complete or full-bodied treatment of the Beach Boys' brilliant, eclectic work during rock's most mythologized year.
Sunday, August 6, 2017
I'm still young and I can write C++ just as good as anyone: May 2017 music diary
Back in May, in the absence of any potential future gigs in my current town, I started a new DJing podcast called Sleaze of the Boom Years. I've posted two episodes so far; they consist of me playing a block of records then chatting briefly and informally about what you've just heard. Repeat four times. They are quite long and not meant to be heard in one sitting unless your schedule is that clear. I'm going to try to get the length under control a bit next time. Here is Episode #1, devoted exclusively to stuff from my vinyl collection, some of it very famous, some not so much. Here is Episode #2, which makes an attempt to flow slightly less jarringly. I would have posted a third episode in July but the month was a mess because of family medical issues and I've not been home much. I'll try to find time soon.
The summer of 2017 has been almost overrun with interesting archival releases that are worth noting here. I talked a bit about the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper reissue set last month, a miraculous collection mostly because at one time it seemed the Beatles would never publicly mine their outtakes again. In terms of the finished product, however, you'll find much more pleasure forthcoming from the exhaustively complete Purple Rain deluxe collection, the first foray into Prince's fabled vault since his death. The set gathers the remastered album (I'm told the mastering is too loud but haven't confirmed), a disc of outstanding studio outtakes, and a collection of all of the non-album material corresponding to that era of his career, including alternate edits. I would probably have sequenced that last disc differently but who cares. The physical set also includes a live DVD, which I've not yet seen but I may stoop to buying compact discs just to get it. Less momentous but no less special to me personally is Radiohead's OK Computer: OKNOTOK 20th anniversary triple-vinyl set; the new third record offers all of the b-sides and three newly completed outtakes from that project, whose importance in my own life I attempted to track in a long narrative posted at my other blog. If you sprung for the super-expensive deluxe set at Radiohead's website you also got a cassette of unreleased material, which has of course leaked online and which I'm anxious to hear when I get the time. The commercial set is handsome, although leaving the booklet out seems like a huge oversight.
The Beach Boys' Wild Honey finally received the treatment it's long deserved as well, in a double-set called 1967: Sunshine Tomorrow, which is the finest and most focused archival collection of Beach Boys music in many years. Perhaps The Smile Sessions was more of an event, but the music wasn't as good. I'll be posting a complete review of this collection in the next few days to add to my BB discography pages. Only thing is, I wish we'd gotten something along the same lines for Today! and Summer Days. In the process of researching the contents of the new release I discovered that Capitol quietly released a 1960s-vintage Beach Boys performance as a new live album late last year, with no fanfare whatsoever. It will be added to my extant entry on live albums soon as well.
Three more of Yoko Ono's momentous '70s albums on Apple saw reissue via Secretly Canadian this month: Fly, the magnificent Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space (which I discovered I had forgotten to grade and include when building my original albums list, oops). These are exceptionally generous packages and it's a thrill to finally own these wondrous records physically, joining the reissue of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band last year. And finally, a much-awaited Pet Shop Boys reissue campaign began, with the dual purposes of continuing their old "Further Listening" series to encompass their later Parlophone albums, and of circumventing the outrageous market that's sprung up for vinyl copies of some of their records. I picked up Release myself and look forward to the reissues of Behavior, Very and Bilingual. And someday I'll even hear the bonus tracks.
But all the while, new music continues to accumulate, and here's another batch -- delayed yet again by external events both within and beyond my control.
Thurston Moore: Rock N Roll Consciousness (Caroline) [r]
These guitars are absolute heaven -- Moore fires off into the subsconscious with these endless drones, robust and powerful like you could live in them -- but then he ruins the vibe completely with his damn singing, which sounds thin and silly in this environment. What a spectacular noise he makes here all the same, though; play "Smoke of Dreams" and "Exalted" loud and find yourself wishing they went on even longer.
Feist: Pleasure (Interscope) [r]
Everything Feist has done since The Reminder has been slightly polite and ineffectual in comparison, even though her launching point seems to be "The Limit to Your Love," her very best song, but still good and worthwhile. The arrangements on her fifth (fourth "proper") album are splendidly idiosyncratic, running down melodic rabbit holes like those on the almost spiritual "Get Not High, Get Not Low," contrasting the florid with the stark in its dynamic production (listen to "A Man Is Not His Song" to hear how she can make a song sound simultaneously expansive and restrained). And even as her songwriting remains curiously uneven -- would the covers that filled out Let It Die relieve the pressure a bit, one wonders? -- her voice still brings chills, with the peak "I'm Not Running Away" harking back to her interpretation of "When I Was a Young Girl" in its earthiness and purity, the kind of song that feels like it existed long before any of us were alive to hear or sing it.
Mark Lanegan Band: Gargoyle (PIAS)
The usual: very classic rawk, very QOTSA with a bit of Dave Navarro goth, very not me.
Brad Paisley: Love and War (Arista)
44 year-old West Virginia native is one of modern country's most celebrated singer-songwriters, capturing the all-American pursuit of meaning well on this amiable collection that struggles with the usual insipid production and lazy writing of seemingly every new record that spews forth from the mainstream of the genre in its present state. He writes about ruined summers, "selfies" and "the internet," Johnny Cash and June Carter, nostalgia, even disgruntled veterans, but I never get the sense that he's putting himself out there or at any sort of risk as he hobnobs around with the increasingly banal likes of Mick Jagger, Timbaland and John Fogerty. 44 probably isn't too early to surrender to being Dad, but 33 is too young to listen to this mess without cringing.
Mac DeMarco: This Old Dog (Captured Tracks) [c]
DeMarco adds shades of psychedelia and even pu-- oh fuck it I can't tell one song from the next from this jackass and I won't lie to you and pretend I can. But I really like the video for the first single.
Perfume Genius: No Shape (Matador)
It's like if Xiu Xiu wasn't deliberately trolling us. I was sold on Mark Hadreas' voice a long time ago but this is his least engaging album to date (meanwhile I'm reeling from the knowledge that it's already three fucking years since the last one), with not one song that bursts through like those two-minute concoctions that could sink their teeth into you so deeply ("Hood" and "Dark Parts," of course, but also "Fool"), and the lyrics seem like a step down. At first it seemed like the songs being uninspired were the problem, just a lackluster set, but his own performance suffers as well, full of affectation and (to my ears) little feeling. Melodramatic anthems are well covered elsewhere; what I miss here is intimacy, immediacy. The production remains beautiful, of course... and also, yeah, kind of annoying.
Slowdive (Dead Oceans) [hr]
Slowdive were one of the bands, Creation labelmates of My Bloody Valentine out of Reading, that I listened to during my exhaustively dedicated shoegaze phase that lasted about a month while I was single, but they never really became a habit the way MBV and Lush did, even though I liked two of their three 1990s albums. (I never heard the last one, Pygmalion, which added electronics.) It could not be said, therefore, that I was anticipating their fiscally wise reunion with bated breath, but their new record finds the quintet reconvening for eight expansive, stunning new songs that instantly render moot any question of nostalgia or revivalism. To describe its sound is misrepresentative and inadequate: yes, dreamlike vocals (by Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell) and beautiful, ringing riffs and maxed-out noise, but there's a reason that people are celebrating it not as a return to form but as a band that has unexpectedly found its voice, and all the vitality implied by that. What makes Slowdive such an achievement is that its songs operate perfectly as a complement to their sonic dynamics and, in terms of their singing and performing of them, the band's subservience to sheer feeling. Written and recorded with the intention of taking it on the road, the LP has the warmth and immediacy of a live rather than a studio creation, mixed at Sunset Sound in L.A. by Chris Coady (whose productions for Beach House are beloved by Slowdive, the influenced influencing the influencers) and rendered as a record for now that's also totally out of time. You can feel it defining your moment. Speaking for myself, its lullabies for the lost are everything I hoped mbv would be and more, from the lilting and bliss of "Star Roving" and "Sugar for the Pill" to the orgasmic "No Longer Making Time". There are great young shoegaze bands that can sweep you up and turn your head right around -- I've come to find Pity Sex's White Hot Moon more and more tragically gorgoeus since they imploded, and I don't think Pinkshinyultrablast's sound is comparable to much else that's happening -- but there's a great deal to be said for the sheer elegance and craft wrought here by the veterans.
The Afghan Whigs: In Spades (Sub Pop)
Cincinnati post-grunge outfit was widely celebrated in the 1990s; I was never aware of them at the time, they've remained a blind spot for me ever since and this is the first album of theirs I have heard. You may claim that I'm therefore missing the context to appreciate it, but that's certainly not a problem with Slowdive, and this just sounds like shitty generic rock to me with very little range. Doesn't mean their old stuff wasn't good, but this isn't.
Pond: The Weather (Marathon Artists) [r]
Not to be confused with yet another '90s act of the same name, this psychedelic Perth group sounds like Bradford Cox or Ariel Pink fronting Deerhoof. Their seventh album (!) is apparently a progression beyond its predecessor, Man It Feels Like Space Again, which I called "Grizzly Bear-lite" in 2015. (I don't remember it, tbh.) Eclectic and weird and emotionally messy, this took a little while to sink it but its slapdash intricacies do end up asserting themselves.
PWR BTTM: Pageant (Polyvinyl [cancelled])
Ill-fated New York punk-queercore duo's second record is a series of anthemic, occasionally goofy and brash songs meant to empower a primarily LGBTQ audience. Singer-guitarist Ben Hopkins had several allegations of sexual assault weighed against him just before this record was issued, resulting in the release being cancelled and pulled from streaming services, the band dropped from their label, but not before a good number of fawning reviews had already made the rounds. You can still hear it on Youtube, to which it's been banished despite the fact that a similar censure never seems to be inflicted upon straight musicians who face similar or worse accusations. (Forget Surfer Blood and Chris Brown; Lostprophets and Charles Manson's albums remain available on Spotify.) I don't want to harp on Polyvinyl, a great label, or on other folks for trying to do their part to do the right thing -- maybe all this means is that those directly affected by this are more conscientious, or maybe times are just changing for the better. But our concern here, where we celebrate all too many problematic artists, is the music, and it's not too great. The revisionist opinion of one writer who says their work now seems "hollow" is onto something, only I don't think the absence of recent news would make me feel any differently about it since these are mostly "Jesse's Girl"-style power chord songs that engage occasionally but mostly pander awkwardly and wouldn't warrant nearly as much excitement if the band's openness about gender and sexuality weren't understandably seen as liberating. Pitchfork posted an article stating that "queer kids deserve better," and they do, not that you'd know it from the publication that dismisses or ignores LGBT musicians such as Ezra Furman and Kate Tempest, but I guess that's none of my business.
Girlpool: Powerplant (Anti-)
Band name is the best thing about this Los Angeles trio, who aren't bad but employ the same boring, whispery vocal style and pedstrian guitar playing on every single track that comprises their second album. The results aren't unpleasant but I can't imagine why all the attention.
(Sandy) Alex G: Rocket (Domino) [r]
Alexander Giannascoli hails from suburban Pennsylvania and has spent time in what sounds like a commune where he makes inscrutable bedroom pop in the vein of Ariel Pink and Beck, and his career (this is his second album on Domino after the lovely, strange Beach Music under the name Alex G) has grown organically from music he made for the amusement of his family and friends. Rocket lurches between genres and ideas so violently, and with such conviction, that it can be exhausting, spinning folk and metal plates while remaining best at a weird impasse of intimate country music with an Elliott Smith tone, though "Big Fish" uncannily recalls an early Ben Gibbard song whose name escapes me. "Proud" and "Bobby" are terrific songs, sung like they have the wind of history behind them. The ramshackle structure has its charm but the energy does flag, yours if not his.
Land of Talk: Life After Youth (Saddle Creek)
Probably weird to take on a guitar band and say you mostly just like the arrangements, but this rough Montreal collective led by one Elizabeth Powell has all the polish and professionalism that comes from a second coming (Powell was active in the Bush and early Obama years; I missed her entirely) and a song like "Inner Lover" sounds radio-ready, but the songs tend to be forgettable. It's either a gateway to something better or the first ebbs of a gradual surrender.
The Mountain Goats: Goths (Merge) [hr]
John Darnielle raises a glass to the KROQ bands -- the real goths and their many imitators -- and the cultists who made their moment and legacy sing out in all its leather-clad, blackened intensity. Darnielle's not joking about his affinity for this now-dormant universe (of course there are still goths, but he's interested in the former goths who laugh nervously when you remind them of this time in their lives), but in an abrupt break from Beat the Champ and many of his other records, he's aligning himself with the mainstream of historical narrative if not musical relevance. Celebrated alternative rock is closer to the wheelhouse of most of Darnielle's fan base than almost anything else he's talked about at length, from meth houses to Bible verses to local wrestling matches, and in a strange sense the direct, literal celebration of Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees (who, lest we forget, inspired Thom Yorke to pursue a musical career, hardly Darnielle's usual casual company) and Gene Loves Jezebel would seem at a glance to be a kind of surrender away from his usual esoteric, unguarded lyricism. What he's actually doing is pushing himself both lyrically and musically, and I don't think I'm saying this because he's singing about and within a world I feel I understand well: not just the era and the genre; after all, I'm more a Flock of Seagulls and Depeche Mode guy than a Birthday Party guy, though I'm sure we could agree on Joy Division. I'm referring to Goths as a paean to California, to its youth culture and music, as deeply felt and honest in its fashion as Endless Summer. The lazy horns, the bursts of sonic energy, the colorful pallette, and the most elaborate Mountain Goats arrangements since The Life of the World to Come gather together to create a parallel narrative with the one indicated on the cover. "Rain in Soho" is kind of an aesthetic lampoon, and the likes of "We Do It Different on the West Coast" and "Unicorn Tolerance" are just slightly expansive, focused variants on the usual Goats material. But on the striking, incredibly engaging "Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds" and on the outstanding suite that begins with "Paid in Cocaine" and ends with the absolutely staggering New Order clone "Shelved," Darnielle and his band push themselves past every sense of expectation and persona and lose themselves in love of a kind of music they've never played before. Does that mean they're growing anonymous, or does that mean they're willing to let these songs sing them while they can? Darnielle alleges that he fully expects people to forget the Mountain Goats one day as completely as they forgot Gene Loves Jezebel. I find it hard to believe that a catharsis this felt, wise and impassioned would be so moving if it came from a less surprising source, and I find it hard to imagine a source capable of such unexpected turns and such personal and varied communication fading into the ether, but maybe I'm just the same kind of lonely fan as Darnielle is here. Either way, this is the most brilliant album about rock & roll since Saint Etienne's Words and Music.
Jlin: Black Origami (Planet Mu) [hr]
Jlin's Dark Energy was somewhat more carefully structured as some sort of dance music than this abrasive, furiously busy collection of playful keyboard loops and often maddening samples. It's all too much, yet it's somehow perfect -- as constantly entertaining as a Chemical Brothers album but as bizarrely addictive in its punchy, noisy restlessness as Crystal Castles or Vessel. It's the ideal motivator for riding out a catastrophe, or staying extra alert while driving, and like Oneohtrix Point Never's R Plus Seven, it has a homespun creative-loafing quality that makes it both modestly impressive and consistently engaging.
Charly Bliss: Guppy (Barsuk) [hr]
Wikipedia lists this fierce but airy Brooklyn quartet (which includes the kid who played Dash in The Incredibles!) as having opened for Veruca Salt and Sleater-Kinney, so I feel less guilty for bringing up that they recall '90s moden rock radio for me -- but not in the strained, obviously deliberate manner of Yuck or Cloud Nothings, more like the organic sense you get with a group like Royal Headache that they're just proud of what formed them. And like Royal Headache, they can write up a storm -- their songs lean punk in arrangement but pure pop in composition, plus furious and funny lyrically, and with Eva Hendricks' terrifically ingratiatingly youthful vocals they bring thoughts of the immortal Cardigans, who I also remember being labeled "bubblegum grunge" at one point. Hendricks sets the stage for the entire record on the introductory "Percolator" when she lets out a spontaneous scream that struggles and succeeds at being heard above the bed of swaying feedback and guitars. Hendricks' lyrics are so splendidly direct, unflinching and familiar, it's like if you stripped the melodrama away from our classic teenage music of yore, even though she's a self-avowed fan of metaphor and hyperbole. There are songs about hookup anxiety, getting high during a show, dreading the looming threat of a day job if this doesn't all work out, kissing someone and instantly regretting it, and just the fully conscious miraculousness of being young and loud. Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but we think "Does he love me most now that his dog is toast?"
Joey Bada$$: All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ (Cinematic) [hr]
Meanwhile, here's an album about the constant terror and dread of being young and loud. Bada$$ is the same age, roughly, as Hendricks and hails from the same borough, but on his second full-length record he sees, like so many before him, no possible respite from the institutional impossibility of living life in these United States if you are not white and well-off. With steady beats by 1-900 and a number of seemingly off-script rants about taking up arms against power, and sobering commentary that a Trump administration spells the beginning of the end, it's a strikingly emphatic, angry political record that makes no use of metaphor or hyperbole. It is not cynical, resigned or pessimistic like There's a Riot Goin' On, it's a statement of purpose that begins with the premise that everything is fucked and has to change. It's quite difficult to find anything to really argue with in his conclusions, and impressive that such a popular performer is choosing to address his audience on these terms so early in his career. Maybe its ideas are "undercooked" if you find it easy to dismiss these as frivolous, youthful, misplaced passions to be set aside once the first 401K payments start, or maybe we're being confronted with truths we would like very much to deny. If the screed that closes "Amerikkkan Idol" is less crafty than Kate Tempest's "Tunnel Vision," its pleadings are no less vividly wise and impassioned.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Freddie Gibbs: You Only Live 2wice (ESGN) - a well-produced, morally suspect Second Coming
Spiral Stairs: Doris & the Daggers (Domino) - so difficult to hate Bud Lite rock when you know how much heart there is in it
Saltland: A Common Truth (Constellation) - cellist Rebecca Foon swoons into the long night and I'd seldom slept better before I noticed the subject
Orchestra Baobob: Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng (World Circuit) - maybe a little too soft but it sounds good
Goldfrapp: Silver Eye (Mute) - hey, someone's weaning them off the Tylenol PM ["Systemagic"]
Les Amazones D'Afrique: Republique Amazone (Real World) - worldbeat is back, if a little generic and polished
IFE: IIII + IIII (Discos Ifá) - pop gets thrown back at us from Yoruba, delightfully; Rostam should join this gang ["Yumavision"]
ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES: (in addition to Jlin above)
Jacques Greene: Feel Infinite (LuckyMe)
Hauschka: What If (Temporary Residence) - maybe a little too much like what they pipe into hospital rooms; "We Live a Thousand Years"]
Actress: AZD (Ninja Tune)
Kelly Lee Owens (Smalltown Supertown)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Sylvan Esso: What Now
* Paramore: After Laughter
Wilsen: I Go Missing in My Sleep
Mary J. Blige: Strength of a Woman
Ryuichi Sakamoto: async
Trombone Shorty: Parking Lot Symphony
Juana Molino: Halo
Forest Swords: Compassion
Blondie: Pollinator
Don Bryant: Don't Give Up on Love
Do Make Say Think: Stubborn Persistent Illusions
Jane Weaver: Modern Kosmology
Chastity Brown: Silhouette of Sirens
REJECTS:
Lydia Ainsworth: Darling of the Afterglow
Rodney Crowell: Close Ties [NYIM]
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan: Neuk Wight Delhi All Stars
The New Year: Snow [NYIM]
Little Cub: Still Life
Willie Nelson: God's Problem Child [NYIM]
John Mellencamp: Sad Clowns & Hillbillies
Colin Stetson: All This I Do for Glory
Mark Mulcahy: The Possom in the Driveway
Gorillaz: Humanz
BNQT: Volume 1
Bill Baird: Easy Machines [NYIM]
John Moreland: Big Bad Luv
Chris Stapleton: From a Room Vol. 1 [NYIM]
Joan Shelley [NYIM]
Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Best Troubador [NYIM]
Black Lips: Satan's Graffiti or God's Art?
At the Drive-In: In-ter a-li-a
Ozomatli: Non-Stop: Mexico to Jamaica [NYIM]
Diagrams: Dorothy
Will Stratton: Rosewood Almanac
Jim Jones & the Righteous Mind: Super Natural
Paul Weller: A Kind Revolution [god, this is depressing]
Pumarosa: The Witch
Low Cut Connie: Dirty Pictures, Pt. 1
Aldous Harding: Party
Nick Hakim: Green Twins
Pokey Lafarge: Manic Revelations
Wavves: You're Welcome
OLD RECORDS RATED (NOT REVIEWED) THIS MONTH
Avey Tare: Down There (Paw Tracks 2010) [r]
Beach House: B-Sides and Rarities (Sub Pop 2009-2017/2017) [-]
Yoko Ono: Feeling the Space (Apple 1973) [hr]
The summer of 2017 has been almost overrun with interesting archival releases that are worth noting here. I talked a bit about the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper reissue set last month, a miraculous collection mostly because at one time it seemed the Beatles would never publicly mine their outtakes again. In terms of the finished product, however, you'll find much more pleasure forthcoming from the exhaustively complete Purple Rain deluxe collection, the first foray into Prince's fabled vault since his death. The set gathers the remastered album (I'm told the mastering is too loud but haven't confirmed), a disc of outstanding studio outtakes, and a collection of all of the non-album material corresponding to that era of his career, including alternate edits. I would probably have sequenced that last disc differently but who cares. The physical set also includes a live DVD, which I've not yet seen but I may stoop to buying compact discs just to get it. Less momentous but no less special to me personally is Radiohead's OK Computer: OKNOTOK 20th anniversary triple-vinyl set; the new third record offers all of the b-sides and three newly completed outtakes from that project, whose importance in my own life I attempted to track in a long narrative posted at my other blog. If you sprung for the super-expensive deluxe set at Radiohead's website you also got a cassette of unreleased material, which has of course leaked online and which I'm anxious to hear when I get the time. The commercial set is handsome, although leaving the booklet out seems like a huge oversight.
The Beach Boys' Wild Honey finally received the treatment it's long deserved as well, in a double-set called 1967: Sunshine Tomorrow, which is the finest and most focused archival collection of Beach Boys music in many years. Perhaps The Smile Sessions was more of an event, but the music wasn't as good. I'll be posting a complete review of this collection in the next few days to add to my BB discography pages. Only thing is, I wish we'd gotten something along the same lines for Today! and Summer Days. In the process of researching the contents of the new release I discovered that Capitol quietly released a 1960s-vintage Beach Boys performance as a new live album late last year, with no fanfare whatsoever. It will be added to my extant entry on live albums soon as well.
Three more of Yoko Ono's momentous '70s albums on Apple saw reissue via Secretly Canadian this month: Fly, the magnificent Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space (which I discovered I had forgotten to grade and include when building my original albums list, oops). These are exceptionally generous packages and it's a thrill to finally own these wondrous records physically, joining the reissue of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band last year. And finally, a much-awaited Pet Shop Boys reissue campaign began, with the dual purposes of continuing their old "Further Listening" series to encompass their later Parlophone albums, and of circumventing the outrageous market that's sprung up for vinyl copies of some of their records. I picked up Release myself and look forward to the reissues of Behavior, Very and Bilingual. And someday I'll even hear the bonus tracks.
But all the while, new music continues to accumulate, and here's another batch -- delayed yet again by external events both within and beyond my control.
Thurston Moore: Rock N Roll Consciousness (Caroline) [r]
These guitars are absolute heaven -- Moore fires off into the subsconscious with these endless drones, robust and powerful like you could live in them -- but then he ruins the vibe completely with his damn singing, which sounds thin and silly in this environment. What a spectacular noise he makes here all the same, though; play "Smoke of Dreams" and "Exalted" loud and find yourself wishing they went on even longer.
Feist: Pleasure (Interscope) [r]
Everything Feist has done since The Reminder has been slightly polite and ineffectual in comparison, even though her launching point seems to be "The Limit to Your Love," her very best song, but still good and worthwhile. The arrangements on her fifth (fourth "proper") album are splendidly idiosyncratic, running down melodic rabbit holes like those on the almost spiritual "Get Not High, Get Not Low," contrasting the florid with the stark in its dynamic production (listen to "A Man Is Not His Song" to hear how she can make a song sound simultaneously expansive and restrained). And even as her songwriting remains curiously uneven -- would the covers that filled out Let It Die relieve the pressure a bit, one wonders? -- her voice still brings chills, with the peak "I'm Not Running Away" harking back to her interpretation of "When I Was a Young Girl" in its earthiness and purity, the kind of song that feels like it existed long before any of us were alive to hear or sing it.
Mark Lanegan Band: Gargoyle (PIAS)
The usual: very classic rawk, very QOTSA with a bit of Dave Navarro goth, very not me.
Brad Paisley: Love and War (Arista)
44 year-old West Virginia native is one of modern country's most celebrated singer-songwriters, capturing the all-American pursuit of meaning well on this amiable collection that struggles with the usual insipid production and lazy writing of seemingly every new record that spews forth from the mainstream of the genre in its present state. He writes about ruined summers, "selfies" and "the internet," Johnny Cash and June Carter, nostalgia, even disgruntled veterans, but I never get the sense that he's putting himself out there or at any sort of risk as he hobnobs around with the increasingly banal likes of Mick Jagger, Timbaland and John Fogerty. 44 probably isn't too early to surrender to being Dad, but 33 is too young to listen to this mess without cringing.
Mac DeMarco: This Old Dog (Captured Tracks) [c]
DeMarco adds shades of psychedelia and even pu-- oh fuck it I can't tell one song from the next from this jackass and I won't lie to you and pretend I can. But I really like the video for the first single.
Perfume Genius: No Shape (Matador)
It's like if Xiu Xiu wasn't deliberately trolling us. I was sold on Mark Hadreas' voice a long time ago but this is his least engaging album to date (meanwhile I'm reeling from the knowledge that it's already three fucking years since the last one), with not one song that bursts through like those two-minute concoctions that could sink their teeth into you so deeply ("Hood" and "Dark Parts," of course, but also "Fool"), and the lyrics seem like a step down. At first it seemed like the songs being uninspired were the problem, just a lackluster set, but his own performance suffers as well, full of affectation and (to my ears) little feeling. Melodramatic anthems are well covered elsewhere; what I miss here is intimacy, immediacy. The production remains beautiful, of course... and also, yeah, kind of annoying.
Slowdive (Dead Oceans) [hr]Slowdive were one of the bands, Creation labelmates of My Bloody Valentine out of Reading, that I listened to during my exhaustively dedicated shoegaze phase that lasted about a month while I was single, but they never really became a habit the way MBV and Lush did, even though I liked two of their three 1990s albums. (I never heard the last one, Pygmalion, which added electronics.) It could not be said, therefore, that I was anticipating their fiscally wise reunion with bated breath, but their new record finds the quintet reconvening for eight expansive, stunning new songs that instantly render moot any question of nostalgia or revivalism. To describe its sound is misrepresentative and inadequate: yes, dreamlike vocals (by Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell) and beautiful, ringing riffs and maxed-out noise, but there's a reason that people are celebrating it not as a return to form but as a band that has unexpectedly found its voice, and all the vitality implied by that. What makes Slowdive such an achievement is that its songs operate perfectly as a complement to their sonic dynamics and, in terms of their singing and performing of them, the band's subservience to sheer feeling. Written and recorded with the intention of taking it on the road, the LP has the warmth and immediacy of a live rather than a studio creation, mixed at Sunset Sound in L.A. by Chris Coady (whose productions for Beach House are beloved by Slowdive, the influenced influencing the influencers) and rendered as a record for now that's also totally out of time. You can feel it defining your moment. Speaking for myself, its lullabies for the lost are everything I hoped mbv would be and more, from the lilting and bliss of "Star Roving" and "Sugar for the Pill" to the orgasmic "No Longer Making Time". There are great young shoegaze bands that can sweep you up and turn your head right around -- I've come to find Pity Sex's White Hot Moon more and more tragically gorgoeus since they imploded, and I don't think Pinkshinyultrablast's sound is comparable to much else that's happening -- but there's a great deal to be said for the sheer elegance and craft wrought here by the veterans.
The Afghan Whigs: In Spades (Sub Pop)
Cincinnati post-grunge outfit was widely celebrated in the 1990s; I was never aware of them at the time, they've remained a blind spot for me ever since and this is the first album of theirs I have heard. You may claim that I'm therefore missing the context to appreciate it, but that's certainly not a problem with Slowdive, and this just sounds like shitty generic rock to me with very little range. Doesn't mean their old stuff wasn't good, but this isn't.
Pond: The Weather (Marathon Artists) [r]
Not to be confused with yet another '90s act of the same name, this psychedelic Perth group sounds like Bradford Cox or Ariel Pink fronting Deerhoof. Their seventh album (!) is apparently a progression beyond its predecessor, Man It Feels Like Space Again, which I called "Grizzly Bear-lite" in 2015. (I don't remember it, tbh.) Eclectic and weird and emotionally messy, this took a little while to sink it but its slapdash intricacies do end up asserting themselves.
PWR BTTM: Pageant (Polyvinyl [cancelled])
Ill-fated New York punk-queercore duo's second record is a series of anthemic, occasionally goofy and brash songs meant to empower a primarily LGBTQ audience. Singer-guitarist Ben Hopkins had several allegations of sexual assault weighed against him just before this record was issued, resulting in the release being cancelled and pulled from streaming services, the band dropped from their label, but not before a good number of fawning reviews had already made the rounds. You can still hear it on Youtube, to which it's been banished despite the fact that a similar censure never seems to be inflicted upon straight musicians who face similar or worse accusations. (Forget Surfer Blood and Chris Brown; Lostprophets and Charles Manson's albums remain available on Spotify.) I don't want to harp on Polyvinyl, a great label, or on other folks for trying to do their part to do the right thing -- maybe all this means is that those directly affected by this are more conscientious, or maybe times are just changing for the better. But our concern here, where we celebrate all too many problematic artists, is the music, and it's not too great. The revisionist opinion of one writer who says their work now seems "hollow" is onto something, only I don't think the absence of recent news would make me feel any differently about it since these are mostly "Jesse's Girl"-style power chord songs that engage occasionally but mostly pander awkwardly and wouldn't warrant nearly as much excitement if the band's openness about gender and sexuality weren't understandably seen as liberating. Pitchfork posted an article stating that "queer kids deserve better," and they do, not that you'd know it from the publication that dismisses or ignores LGBT musicians such as Ezra Furman and Kate Tempest, but I guess that's none of my business.
Girlpool: Powerplant (Anti-)
Band name is the best thing about this Los Angeles trio, who aren't bad but employ the same boring, whispery vocal style and pedstrian guitar playing on every single track that comprises their second album. The results aren't unpleasant but I can't imagine why all the attention.
(Sandy) Alex G: Rocket (Domino) [r]
Alexander Giannascoli hails from suburban Pennsylvania and has spent time in what sounds like a commune where he makes inscrutable bedroom pop in the vein of Ariel Pink and Beck, and his career (this is his second album on Domino after the lovely, strange Beach Music under the name Alex G) has grown organically from music he made for the amusement of his family and friends. Rocket lurches between genres and ideas so violently, and with such conviction, that it can be exhausting, spinning folk and metal plates while remaining best at a weird impasse of intimate country music with an Elliott Smith tone, though "Big Fish" uncannily recalls an early Ben Gibbard song whose name escapes me. "Proud" and "Bobby" are terrific songs, sung like they have the wind of history behind them. The ramshackle structure has its charm but the energy does flag, yours if not his.
Land of Talk: Life After Youth (Saddle Creek)
Probably weird to take on a guitar band and say you mostly just like the arrangements, but this rough Montreal collective led by one Elizabeth Powell has all the polish and professionalism that comes from a second coming (Powell was active in the Bush and early Obama years; I missed her entirely) and a song like "Inner Lover" sounds radio-ready, but the songs tend to be forgettable. It's either a gateway to something better or the first ebbs of a gradual surrender.
The Mountain Goats: Goths (Merge) [hr]John Darnielle raises a glass to the KROQ bands -- the real goths and their many imitators -- and the cultists who made their moment and legacy sing out in all its leather-clad, blackened intensity. Darnielle's not joking about his affinity for this now-dormant universe (of course there are still goths, but he's interested in the former goths who laugh nervously when you remind them of this time in their lives), but in an abrupt break from Beat the Champ and many of his other records, he's aligning himself with the mainstream of historical narrative if not musical relevance. Celebrated alternative rock is closer to the wheelhouse of most of Darnielle's fan base than almost anything else he's talked about at length, from meth houses to Bible verses to local wrestling matches, and in a strange sense the direct, literal celebration of Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees (who, lest we forget, inspired Thom Yorke to pursue a musical career, hardly Darnielle's usual casual company) and Gene Loves Jezebel would seem at a glance to be a kind of surrender away from his usual esoteric, unguarded lyricism. What he's actually doing is pushing himself both lyrically and musically, and I don't think I'm saying this because he's singing about and within a world I feel I understand well: not just the era and the genre; after all, I'm more a Flock of Seagulls and Depeche Mode guy than a Birthday Party guy, though I'm sure we could agree on Joy Division. I'm referring to Goths as a paean to California, to its youth culture and music, as deeply felt and honest in its fashion as Endless Summer. The lazy horns, the bursts of sonic energy, the colorful pallette, and the most elaborate Mountain Goats arrangements since The Life of the World to Come gather together to create a parallel narrative with the one indicated on the cover. "Rain in Soho" is kind of an aesthetic lampoon, and the likes of "We Do It Different on the West Coast" and "Unicorn Tolerance" are just slightly expansive, focused variants on the usual Goats material. But on the striking, incredibly engaging "Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds" and on the outstanding suite that begins with "Paid in Cocaine" and ends with the absolutely staggering New Order clone "Shelved," Darnielle and his band push themselves past every sense of expectation and persona and lose themselves in love of a kind of music they've never played before. Does that mean they're growing anonymous, or does that mean they're willing to let these songs sing them while they can? Darnielle alleges that he fully expects people to forget the Mountain Goats one day as completely as they forgot Gene Loves Jezebel. I find it hard to believe that a catharsis this felt, wise and impassioned would be so moving if it came from a less surprising source, and I find it hard to imagine a source capable of such unexpected turns and such personal and varied communication fading into the ether, but maybe I'm just the same kind of lonely fan as Darnielle is here. Either way, this is the most brilliant album about rock & roll since Saint Etienne's Words and Music.
Jlin: Black Origami (Planet Mu) [hr] Jlin's Dark Energy was somewhat more carefully structured as some sort of dance music than this abrasive, furiously busy collection of playful keyboard loops and often maddening samples. It's all too much, yet it's somehow perfect -- as constantly entertaining as a Chemical Brothers album but as bizarrely addictive in its punchy, noisy restlessness as Crystal Castles or Vessel. It's the ideal motivator for riding out a catastrophe, or staying extra alert while driving, and like Oneohtrix Point Never's R Plus Seven, it has a homespun creative-loafing quality that makes it both modestly impressive and consistently engaging.
Charly Bliss: Guppy (Barsuk) [hr]Wikipedia lists this fierce but airy Brooklyn quartet (which includes the kid who played Dash in The Incredibles!) as having opened for Veruca Salt and Sleater-Kinney, so I feel less guilty for bringing up that they recall '90s moden rock radio for me -- but not in the strained, obviously deliberate manner of Yuck or Cloud Nothings, more like the organic sense you get with a group like Royal Headache that they're just proud of what formed them. And like Royal Headache, they can write up a storm -- their songs lean punk in arrangement but pure pop in composition, plus furious and funny lyrically, and with Eva Hendricks' terrifically ingratiatingly youthful vocals they bring thoughts of the immortal Cardigans, who I also remember being labeled "bubblegum grunge" at one point. Hendricks sets the stage for the entire record on the introductory "Percolator" when she lets out a spontaneous scream that struggles and succeeds at being heard above the bed of swaying feedback and guitars. Hendricks' lyrics are so splendidly direct, unflinching and familiar, it's like if you stripped the melodrama away from our classic teenage music of yore, even though she's a self-avowed fan of metaphor and hyperbole. There are songs about hookup anxiety, getting high during a show, dreading the looming threat of a day job if this doesn't all work out, kissing someone and instantly regretting it, and just the fully conscious miraculousness of being young and loud. Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but we think "Does he love me most now that his dog is toast?"
Joey Bada$$: All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ (Cinematic) [hr]Meanwhile, here's an album about the constant terror and dread of being young and loud. Bada$$ is the same age, roughly, as Hendricks and hails from the same borough, but on his second full-length record he sees, like so many before him, no possible respite from the institutional impossibility of living life in these United States if you are not white and well-off. With steady beats by 1-900 and a number of seemingly off-script rants about taking up arms against power, and sobering commentary that a Trump administration spells the beginning of the end, it's a strikingly emphatic, angry political record that makes no use of metaphor or hyperbole. It is not cynical, resigned or pessimistic like There's a Riot Goin' On, it's a statement of purpose that begins with the premise that everything is fucked and has to change. It's quite difficult to find anything to really argue with in his conclusions, and impressive that such a popular performer is choosing to address his audience on these terms so early in his career. Maybe its ideas are "undercooked" if you find it easy to dismiss these as frivolous, youthful, misplaced passions to be set aside once the first 401K payments start, or maybe we're being confronted with truths we would like very much to deny. If the screed that closes "Amerikkkan Idol" is less crafty than Kate Tempest's "Tunnel Vision," its pleadings are no less vividly wise and impassioned.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Freddie Gibbs: You Only Live 2wice (ESGN) - a well-produced, morally suspect Second Coming
Spiral Stairs: Doris & the Daggers (Domino) - so difficult to hate Bud Lite rock when you know how much heart there is in it
Saltland: A Common Truth (Constellation) - cellist Rebecca Foon swoons into the long night and I'd seldom slept better before I noticed the subject
Orchestra Baobob: Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng (World Circuit) - maybe a little too soft but it sounds good
Goldfrapp: Silver Eye (Mute) - hey, someone's weaning them off the Tylenol PM ["Systemagic"]
Les Amazones D'Afrique: Republique Amazone (Real World) - worldbeat is back, if a little generic and polished
IFE: IIII + IIII (Discos Ifá) - pop gets thrown back at us from Yoruba, delightfully; Rostam should join this gang ["Yumavision"]
ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES: (in addition to Jlin above)
Jacques Greene: Feel Infinite (LuckyMe)
Hauschka: What If (Temporary Residence) - maybe a little too much like what they pipe into hospital rooms; "We Live a Thousand Years"]
Actress: AZD (Ninja Tune)
Kelly Lee Owens (Smalltown Supertown)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Sylvan Esso: What Now
* Paramore: After Laughter
Wilsen: I Go Missing in My Sleep
Mary J. Blige: Strength of a Woman
Ryuichi Sakamoto: async
Trombone Shorty: Parking Lot Symphony
Juana Molino: Halo
Forest Swords: Compassion
Blondie: Pollinator
Don Bryant: Don't Give Up on Love
Do Make Say Think: Stubborn Persistent Illusions
Jane Weaver: Modern Kosmology
Chastity Brown: Silhouette of Sirens
REJECTS:
Lydia Ainsworth: Darling of the Afterglow
Rodney Crowell: Close Ties [NYIM]
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan: Neuk Wight Delhi All Stars
The New Year: Snow [NYIM]
Little Cub: Still Life
Willie Nelson: God's Problem Child [NYIM]
John Mellencamp: Sad Clowns & Hillbillies
Colin Stetson: All This I Do for Glory
Mark Mulcahy: The Possom in the Driveway
Gorillaz: Humanz
BNQT: Volume 1
Bill Baird: Easy Machines [NYIM]
John Moreland: Big Bad Luv
Chris Stapleton: From a Room Vol. 1 [NYIM]
Joan Shelley [NYIM]
Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Best Troubador [NYIM]
Black Lips: Satan's Graffiti or God's Art?
At the Drive-In: In-ter a-li-a
Ozomatli: Non-Stop: Mexico to Jamaica [NYIM]
Diagrams: Dorothy
Will Stratton: Rosewood Almanac
Jim Jones & the Righteous Mind: Super Natural
Paul Weller: A Kind Revolution [god, this is depressing]
Pumarosa: The Witch
Low Cut Connie: Dirty Pictures, Pt. 1
Aldous Harding: Party
Nick Hakim: Green Twins
Pokey Lafarge: Manic Revelations
Wavves: You're Welcome
OLD RECORDS RATED (NOT REVIEWED) THIS MONTH
Avey Tare: Down There (Paw Tracks 2010) [r]
Beach House: B-Sides and Rarities (Sub Pop 2009-2017/2017) [-]
Yoko Ono: Feeling the Space (Apple 1973) [hr]
Saturday, June 24, 2017
You did all you could: April 2017 music diary
Before we return to the current century, some thoughts related to the last one: I've now read both Brian Wilson and Mike Love's new autobiographies -- Wilson's is unexpectedly delightful, Love's predictably dire but not without interest -- and my brief thoughts have been added to the Beach Boys overview page. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I did indeed listen to all of the newly issued Sgt. Pepper material; you'll be hearing more about it when I get my Beatles project off the ground in the next few months, but for now, the remix is decent apart from a few curious choices, and the outtakes are fun to hear once (nothing truly revelatory) except for the "Strawberry Fields Forever" material, most of which has been booted but almost all of which is sublime. I have another announcement I thought I'd be ready to make but I'm not, so instead here's another post that was supposed to be ready in two weeks but took three and a half. I'm so good at this.
Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me (PW Elverum & Sun) [c]
If there's a delicate way of saying this, I can't think of it: I don't think that this album should exist, at least not for you and me to hear. Last July Geneviève Castrée did of pancreatic cancer. She was the wife of musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, and his widely acclaimed new album (even Danny Brown tweeted about being moved to tears by it) is a song cycle -- in his usual hushed acoustic style, only more so -- about his grief and attempts to cope with the aftermath of his loss. Being deeply in love with someone for more than eight years myself, I cannot fathom the pain he is enduring at this moment, no matter how intimately he chooses to document it here, and my heart sincerely goes out to him. But when I listen to this I can't escape the sensation that it's something I have no business hearing... moreover, something that has no business being fawned over, celebrated, analyzed, as it simply is not built for such treatment. Nick Cave's album Skeleton Tree that still ached with the loss of his teenage son had a complicated genesis and was filtered through a sense of abstraction, duty, distraction. Elverum confronts the agony head-on, which is something that often must be done, but for anyone but him and his family, friends or therapists to engage with these highly specific and personal non-songs -- they are absolutely not songs, just strummed chords with Mark Kozelek-like diary entries floating above them -- feels exploitative, and frankly I'm suspicious of any audience member fetishizing it in the same way I'm suspicious of the mythology drawn around, say, Brian and Dennis Wilson's coked-out piano tapes. The artist's therapy or the artist's lowest ebb or most human, vulnerable moment shouldn't be in the world for us to look at it, to judge as a constructed artistic work. He says it himself at the outset: "death is real, someone's there and then they're not / it's not for singing about, it's not for making into art." He's right, and this isn't art, it's the selling -- perhaps by outside pressure, who's to say? -- of private bereavement, and it's a terrible experience: how does the publication, for Pitchfork and Spotify's benefit, of a verse about his wife's final bloody tissues benefit his well-being? And I must admit that in a selfish sense, I also find it gauche: how do you judge this on its own merit without sounding like an asshole? You can't, and that's the problem.
Bob Dylan: Triplicate (Columbia) [c]
Once and for all: your voice becomes beloved, an addiction, a passion, because of the words that you sing (the ones that you just accepted a Nobel Prize for) and the idiosyncrasies it adds to them. It has nothing to add to standards made famous by technically stronger voices. We hear past or through the voice to hear the words, your words, but that gives no compelling reason to hear you slathering it -- more weakly and less in tune than ever -- over the songs of others, apart from an extremely misguided brand of nostalgia. This was true in the early 1990s. It is true now. And a triple-record set of it is more than a joke, which is what your last two albums (and that Christmas nonsense, for that matter) were; it's obscenely unnecessary. I would honestly prefer it if you and Brian both just left pop standards, blues standards, jazz standards, Gershwin standards, Disney standards, showtunes, whatever alone and went gently, quietly into the night until you had something interesting to say. Said with love but also with genuine irritation, because you don't seem to realize that those of us who think your work is important enough to belong in a canon have to actually listen to this shit.
Aimee Mann: Mental Illness (Superego)
Mann in the 2010s is remarkably similar to Mann in the 1980s and 1990s: sings well, is a competent strummer, is totally boring but impossible to find offensive.
Arca (XL) [c]
Number of seconds it takes for each track on this album to become intolerably annoying (please note that this is not a measurement of when each cut's first annoying thing happens, merely a judgment of when the steady accumulation of irritation pushes one over the edge): 1) 50. 2) 20. 3) 7. 4) 43. 5) 8. 6) 12. 7) 19. 8) 28. 9) 0 -- or 23, if we're being very generous. 10) 62 (nice job!). 11) 14. 12) 16. 13) 17. Average: 25, meaning that the ideal Arca experience would be those faded-out samples they used to post on CDNow.
Diet Cig: Swear I'm Good at This (Frenchkiss) [r]
Alex Luciano's voice is a soft but demanding whine, her guitar playing a helicopter propeller that defies the tentative insecurity she writes about; but the attraction on this delightful New York punk duo's first album is really the way those lilting, nagging, slightly grating (in a way that she knows, expertly, how to use) vocals meld with lyrics that some may find trite, that others -- like me -- will find disarmingly honest and probing. For instance, "it's hard to be a punk while wearing a skirt" sounds like a charming but empty motivational poster except that Luciano melds it into a desperate confession and rallying cry -- and precedes it, crucially, with "my stomach hurts." And there are other narratives of post-adolescent misery that you may pretend are the mutterings of the Entitled Millennial personified, but the great fact of being part of this generation is the loneliness that sometimes feels inherited; mixed in with observational tales of fucking a guy with the same name and wanting to go back to being a kid with cake and ice cream on one's birthday, there's "Bite Back," wherein "I'm so lonely in this big city / and everybody's so damn busy" is repeated until it becomes funny, repeated until it becomes powerful, repeated until it becomes an act of protest, repeated until it becomes radical self-preservation.
The New Pornographers: Whiteout Conditions (Concord) [r]
Unless you count the surplus of low-energy ballads on Challengers, the New Pornographers' seventh album is their first major break away from the formula that's generated all of their previous output (it's also their first album as labelmates to Paul McCartney). That's because Dan Bejar is gone -- maybe permanently, who can say? -- and the sound has fully surrendered to a flaunting of Carl Newman's record-collector credentials. There's initially intrigue in the way the title track smudges its pursuit of pleasure, but its fusion of Newman's usual stilted XTC-like writing fused with widescreen Arcade Fire theatrics -- though with complex, unpredictable chords and notes that never ring out with the winning simplicity of real pop or arena rock, for better or worse -- sets the stage for everything that follows. In other words, it's every previous New Pornographers album but more so, and as preoccupied with its indulgent definitions of pleasure as Newman's solo records. It never soars like their best work, no matter how Neko Case's full-throated vocal on "This Is the World of the Theater" may try to get there, and the absence of Bejar's tension-cutting contributions makes the record feel as much like an out-of-control roller coaster as a Cars greatest-hits album. Newman's no creative force to dismiss -- he has never sung with more confidence and infectious enthusiasm, even if his lyrics remain minefields of repetitive nonsense as always -- but (apart from the nicely economical "Clockwise") these songs manage to feel too long even with none of them far exceeding four and a half minutes. Bejar's worse off on his own as Destroyer, running toward accidental self-mockery when unchecked; but so is Newman, whose songs eventually feel computer-generated.
Father John Misty: Pure Comedy (Sub Pop) [NO]
Like Mount Eerie, Josh Tillman is a songwriter who doesn't write music, whose post-Fleet Foxes career (ugh, imagine that as the sad defining line in your resumé, no wonder he's such a miserable sack of shit) implies he neither knows nor cares what that means, and if you challenge him on it he can always pretend he's no longer Josh or Joshua or J. but Father John Misty, the persona he pretends to adopt when he sings his alternately deplorable and laughably preachy polemics hummed and barked over skeletal chords and schlocky mid-'70s AM radio arrangements. His favored use for the Misty name is to proudly wave his own self-indulgence like a flag while beating himself with it, presumably in the interest of gaining credit for honesty... while still hiding behind the risk-free cruel detachment of an internet dirtbag living in the post-apocalyptic universe of Fahrenheit 451 or The Lobster. He's Conor Oberst with slower music except he thinks his unfiltered thought processes make him a rock star megagod, a maddeningly boring version of a hair metal guy who loathes his audience, a fucking Tim Heidecker character. It doesn't scare him to lay anything bare because none of this matters to him except that he's being told his hot shit, or as he puts it, "I've got the world by the balls, am I supposed to behave?" (and if you think Tillman has earned Kendrick Lamar's right to tell everyone else to sit down, compare the sales figures of this album and DAMN.). In short, this is just like the last record, which included a song about choking a woman in bed because he hated her "soulful affectation," except it now includes a Very Important Public Service Announcement about religion, and I'm so glad he's chosen to grace us with his insights: "They get terribly upset / when you question their sacred texts / written by woman-hating epileptics [...] and how's this for irony, their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs!" Basically Misty is the stereotype of every smug, entitled white male personified; he's the most obnoxious musician alive in America today, bar none.
Khalid: American Teen (RCA)
Teens! We love 'em, right? This 19 year-old Texan -- he sounds it too, introducing a rural drawl into his anthemic R&B -- senses something universal in stories of trying to get the weed smell out of his car, but his songs are catchy and deeply uninteresting runs through a world that seems to be explored in shorthand. In fact, it often feels like post-adolescent life defined by writers, producers, executives old enough to remember the month in which Khalid was born, because that's what it is. The kid's trying -- I like "8TEEN" -- but he's drowned out by synergy.
Gas: Narkopop (Kompakt) [r]
Wolfgang Voigt's acid-stoked ambient goes back decades now, and he's something of an expert at filling up a quiet, tense room -- his lengthy return (78:39) feels far shorter than it is. It's a little scary sometimes and never either wholly sumptuous or repellent.
Kendrick Lamar: DAMN. (Interscope) [hr]
A three-year gap ensued after the near-masterpiece good kid, m.A.A.d city, but DAMN. in turn marks three consecutive years with a major new project from Lamar, probably at the moment the most beloved male performer of popular music in the country, and the rock star upon whom all eyes and ears are most universally cast right now. DAMN. is a more erratic collection in terms of its consistency than the supposed throwaway LP untitled unmastered., and its rundown of post-fame pratfalls, doubts and modest boasts and self-assessment with shades of Biblical apocalypse doesn't have the conceptual death of To Pimp a Butterfly, but it's his first album since Section.80 that, for all its consternation about stardom and the maddening state of the country, is equally concerned with delivering the goods for his increasingly huge audience. It's yet another gathering of incredibly evocative performances, hooks, features and ideas -- inventively produced too. All the tracks are immediate, coming faster and lingering longer than any previous apart from "King Kunta." It's easier to pick out the moments you want to hold permanently at your side than it was on his other records, and this time they are mostly not moments but songs -- the two trap singles produced by Mike Will, the Marvin Gaye-like BadBadNotGood collaboration "LUST." and the glorious Alchemist production "FEAR." -- with the exception of the moment-defining finale of "BLOOD.," a ghostly "The Gift"-like narrative about an unprompted murder, when a sample of two FNC pundits decrying the lyrics of the BLM anthem "Alright" dissolves into Lamar's undaunted freak-flag intro to "DNA." The only misstep is an exceedingly ordinary love song (entitled "LOVE.") with a guest vocal from the anonymous Zacari Pacaldo. There's something uncommonly comforting about an artist as trusted and righteous as Lamar serving commentary about the last few months in our lives -- "We all woke up, tryin' to tune to the daily news / looking for confirmation hoping election wasn't true / all of us worried, all of us buried and the feeling's deep / none of us married to his proposal, makes us feel cheap / still and sad, distraught and mad, tell the neighbor about it / bet they agree, parade the streets with your voice proudly / time passing, things change / revertin' back to our daily programs, stick in our ways" -- mirroring Kate Tempest's prediction of this narrative in "Tunnel Vision," but because of said daily programs, the words that sing out with the most power are those in which Lamar tries to process everything that's happened to him personally and gives conflicted perspective: "I feel like the whole world want me to pray for 'em / But who the fuck prayin' for me?"
Robyn Hitchcock (Yep Roc) [r]
It's almost never acknowledged what a versatile singer Hitchcock is; from Underwater Moonlight right up to this third album for Yep Roc, he can fill in almost any of your blanks from the scope of new wave, British Invasion and power pop influences that define him. Here he's John Cale, here Tom Petty, here Ray Davies, and always with a wit and a sweet lilt whose irresistibility defies his reputation as an off-center quack. There's no song here to match "The Ghost in You" from 2014, his strongest composition in decades, but it's more consistently appealing than The Man Upstairs and the stirring lullaby "1970 in Aspic" will remind you why you care what he's up to.
Ibibio Sound Machine: Uyai (Merge) [hr]
Props to Merge, newly down an Arcade Fire and several Spoons, for replacing them with a Nigerian-by-way-of-London musical collective whose output is all but unclassifiable; cathartic opener "Give Me a Reason" is as beholden to techno and funk as it is to West African polyrhythms, and this cornucopia of influences, beautifully redefining the narrative of what comprises folk music from the ground up, continues throughout to make this an engaging modern example of traditionalism shot through with pleasure and paranoia, a welcome return to worldbeat aspirations without the soul-crushing commercial imperative. Singer Eno Williams, her voice ice and fire, is a master storyteller and raconteur, and a disco superstar (see "The Pot Is on Fire"). An undeniable thrill, the party record of 2017.
Valerie June: The Order of Time (Concord) [hr]
Why did you first come to love Americana, or alt-country or alt-folk or whatever the vogue term is, when you came across it? Presumably because it was music that could sound both sophisticated and comfortably effortless; folk embraces the strange individual quirk in its mainstream while other genres place it on the fringes. But like country music itself, this world is now dominated by what Thom Yorke called "fridge buzz," a deadening obligation for a certain sound and feeling above all else that has gradually rendered several careers, frankly, pointless -- listen to Great Lake Swimmers' catalog, album by album, for a depressing example. So far, however, Memphis singer-songwriter Valerie June has pushed against the coffee bar NPR morass (though no doubt they are more than happy to embrace her) to write and produce material that feels entirely divorced from time (its central preoccupation) and from outside motivations. This succeeds beautifully; it's unspeakably moving, lovely music that will make you want to shut out and forget everything else. June's stunning, unique vocals are a Daniel Johnston-style attack on radio dross with their Billie Holiday-Joanna Newsom cadences, and the songs are ethereal, immediate, monochromatic, relaxed and warm without a trace of constraint to their lovely spareness. The first two cuts will convince you -- they seem, lyrically and musically, far older than June's 35 years -- and while "Shakedown" and "Got Soul" need their complete context to achieve their proper roles as climactic triumphs, you won't need any setup to fall into the quiet bliss of "Two Hearts" and "Slip Slide on By."
***
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
Karriem Riggins: Headnod Suite (Stones Throw): nearly thirty breakdowns from Detroit-born jazz/hip hop drummer-producer, not Donuts but fun
Oddisee: The Iceberg (Mello Music): twelve good and true moments-in-time of consciousness
Anohni: Paradise (Secretly Canadian EP): I didn't write in for track seven but maybe I should
ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES: (in addition to Gas' Narkopop above)
Sherwood & Pinch: Man vs. Sofa (On-U)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Freddie Gibbs: You Only Live 2wice
* Charly Bliss: Guppy
Jacques Greene: Feel Infinite
Kelly Lee Owens
Spiral Stairs: Doris & the Daggers
Hauschka: What If
Saltland: A Common Truth
Lydia Ainsworth: Darling of the Afterglow
Orchestra Baobob: Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng
Goldfrapp: Silver Eye
Les Amazones D'Afrique: Republique Amazone
Rodney Crowell: Close Ties
IFE: IIII + IIII
Joey Bada$$: All-Amerikkkan Bada$$
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan: Neuk Wight Delhi All Stars
Actress: AZD
REJECTS:
Stormzy: Gang Signs & Prayer [NYIM]
Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Navigator [NYIM]
Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble: Find Me Finding You [NYIM]
Creeper: Eternity, in Your Arms
Craig Finn: We All Want the Same Things
The Moonlandingz: Interplanetary Class Classics
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Damage and Joy
Jake Xerxes Fussell: What in the Natural World
British Sea Power: Let the Dancers Inherit the Party
Pharmakon: Contact [NYIM]
Mastodon: Emperor of Sand
Pile: A Hairshirt of Purpose
Leela James: Did It for Love [NYIM]
Happyness: Write In
Ulver: The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Andrew Combs: Canyons of My Mind
Timber Timbre: Sincerely, Future Pollution
Wire: Silver/Lead
Future Islands: The Far Field
Jeb Loy Nichols: Country Hustle
Fionn Regan: The Meetings of the Waters
Part Chimp: Iv
Woods: Love Is Love
Ron Sexsmith: The Last Rider
Tara Jane O'Neil [NYIM]
Joe Goddard: Electric Lines
Angaleena Presley: Wrangled
Ray Davies: Americana
OLD RECORDS RATED (NOT REVIEWED) THIS MONTH:
The Avett Brothers: Mignonette (Ramseur 2004) [-]
Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me (PW Elverum & Sun) [c]
If there's a delicate way of saying this, I can't think of it: I don't think that this album should exist, at least not for you and me to hear. Last July Geneviève Castrée did of pancreatic cancer. She was the wife of musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, and his widely acclaimed new album (even Danny Brown tweeted about being moved to tears by it) is a song cycle -- in his usual hushed acoustic style, only more so -- about his grief and attempts to cope with the aftermath of his loss. Being deeply in love with someone for more than eight years myself, I cannot fathom the pain he is enduring at this moment, no matter how intimately he chooses to document it here, and my heart sincerely goes out to him. But when I listen to this I can't escape the sensation that it's something I have no business hearing... moreover, something that has no business being fawned over, celebrated, analyzed, as it simply is not built for such treatment. Nick Cave's album Skeleton Tree that still ached with the loss of his teenage son had a complicated genesis and was filtered through a sense of abstraction, duty, distraction. Elverum confronts the agony head-on, which is something that often must be done, but for anyone but him and his family, friends or therapists to engage with these highly specific and personal non-songs -- they are absolutely not songs, just strummed chords with Mark Kozelek-like diary entries floating above them -- feels exploitative, and frankly I'm suspicious of any audience member fetishizing it in the same way I'm suspicious of the mythology drawn around, say, Brian and Dennis Wilson's coked-out piano tapes. The artist's therapy or the artist's lowest ebb or most human, vulnerable moment shouldn't be in the world for us to look at it, to judge as a constructed artistic work. He says it himself at the outset: "death is real, someone's there and then they're not / it's not for singing about, it's not for making into art." He's right, and this isn't art, it's the selling -- perhaps by outside pressure, who's to say? -- of private bereavement, and it's a terrible experience: how does the publication, for Pitchfork and Spotify's benefit, of a verse about his wife's final bloody tissues benefit his well-being? And I must admit that in a selfish sense, I also find it gauche: how do you judge this on its own merit without sounding like an asshole? You can't, and that's the problem.
Bob Dylan: Triplicate (Columbia) [c]
Once and for all: your voice becomes beloved, an addiction, a passion, because of the words that you sing (the ones that you just accepted a Nobel Prize for) and the idiosyncrasies it adds to them. It has nothing to add to standards made famous by technically stronger voices. We hear past or through the voice to hear the words, your words, but that gives no compelling reason to hear you slathering it -- more weakly and less in tune than ever -- over the songs of others, apart from an extremely misguided brand of nostalgia. This was true in the early 1990s. It is true now. And a triple-record set of it is more than a joke, which is what your last two albums (and that Christmas nonsense, for that matter) were; it's obscenely unnecessary. I would honestly prefer it if you and Brian both just left pop standards, blues standards, jazz standards, Gershwin standards, Disney standards, showtunes, whatever alone and went gently, quietly into the night until you had something interesting to say. Said with love but also with genuine irritation, because you don't seem to realize that those of us who think your work is important enough to belong in a canon have to actually listen to this shit.
Aimee Mann: Mental Illness (Superego)
Mann in the 2010s is remarkably similar to Mann in the 1980s and 1990s: sings well, is a competent strummer, is totally boring but impossible to find offensive.
Arca (XL) [c]
Number of seconds it takes for each track on this album to become intolerably annoying (please note that this is not a measurement of when each cut's first annoying thing happens, merely a judgment of when the steady accumulation of irritation pushes one over the edge): 1) 50. 2) 20. 3) 7. 4) 43. 5) 8. 6) 12. 7) 19. 8) 28. 9) 0 -- or 23, if we're being very generous. 10) 62 (nice job!). 11) 14. 12) 16. 13) 17. Average: 25, meaning that the ideal Arca experience would be those faded-out samples they used to post on CDNow.
Diet Cig: Swear I'm Good at This (Frenchkiss) [r]
Alex Luciano's voice is a soft but demanding whine, her guitar playing a helicopter propeller that defies the tentative insecurity she writes about; but the attraction on this delightful New York punk duo's first album is really the way those lilting, nagging, slightly grating (in a way that she knows, expertly, how to use) vocals meld with lyrics that some may find trite, that others -- like me -- will find disarmingly honest and probing. For instance, "it's hard to be a punk while wearing a skirt" sounds like a charming but empty motivational poster except that Luciano melds it into a desperate confession and rallying cry -- and precedes it, crucially, with "my stomach hurts." And there are other narratives of post-adolescent misery that you may pretend are the mutterings of the Entitled Millennial personified, but the great fact of being part of this generation is the loneliness that sometimes feels inherited; mixed in with observational tales of fucking a guy with the same name and wanting to go back to being a kid with cake and ice cream on one's birthday, there's "Bite Back," wherein "I'm so lonely in this big city / and everybody's so damn busy" is repeated until it becomes funny, repeated until it becomes powerful, repeated until it becomes an act of protest, repeated until it becomes radical self-preservation.
The New Pornographers: Whiteout Conditions (Concord) [r]
Unless you count the surplus of low-energy ballads on Challengers, the New Pornographers' seventh album is their first major break away from the formula that's generated all of their previous output (it's also their first album as labelmates to Paul McCartney). That's because Dan Bejar is gone -- maybe permanently, who can say? -- and the sound has fully surrendered to a flaunting of Carl Newman's record-collector credentials. There's initially intrigue in the way the title track smudges its pursuit of pleasure, but its fusion of Newman's usual stilted XTC-like writing fused with widescreen Arcade Fire theatrics -- though with complex, unpredictable chords and notes that never ring out with the winning simplicity of real pop or arena rock, for better or worse -- sets the stage for everything that follows. In other words, it's every previous New Pornographers album but more so, and as preoccupied with its indulgent definitions of pleasure as Newman's solo records. It never soars like their best work, no matter how Neko Case's full-throated vocal on "This Is the World of the Theater" may try to get there, and the absence of Bejar's tension-cutting contributions makes the record feel as much like an out-of-control roller coaster as a Cars greatest-hits album. Newman's no creative force to dismiss -- he has never sung with more confidence and infectious enthusiasm, even if his lyrics remain minefields of repetitive nonsense as always -- but (apart from the nicely economical "Clockwise") these songs manage to feel too long even with none of them far exceeding four and a half minutes. Bejar's worse off on his own as Destroyer, running toward accidental self-mockery when unchecked; but so is Newman, whose songs eventually feel computer-generated.
Father John Misty: Pure Comedy (Sub Pop) [NO]
Like Mount Eerie, Josh Tillman is a songwriter who doesn't write music, whose post-Fleet Foxes career (ugh, imagine that as the sad defining line in your resumé, no wonder he's such a miserable sack of shit) implies he neither knows nor cares what that means, and if you challenge him on it he can always pretend he's no longer Josh or Joshua or J. but Father John Misty, the persona he pretends to adopt when he sings his alternately deplorable and laughably preachy polemics hummed and barked over skeletal chords and schlocky mid-'70s AM radio arrangements. His favored use for the Misty name is to proudly wave his own self-indulgence like a flag while beating himself with it, presumably in the interest of gaining credit for honesty... while still hiding behind the risk-free cruel detachment of an internet dirtbag living in the post-apocalyptic universe of Fahrenheit 451 or The Lobster. He's Conor Oberst with slower music except he thinks his unfiltered thought processes make him a rock star megagod, a maddeningly boring version of a hair metal guy who loathes his audience, a fucking Tim Heidecker character. It doesn't scare him to lay anything bare because none of this matters to him except that he's being told his hot shit, or as he puts it, "I've got the world by the balls, am I supposed to behave?" (and if you think Tillman has earned Kendrick Lamar's right to tell everyone else to sit down, compare the sales figures of this album and DAMN.). In short, this is just like the last record, which included a song about choking a woman in bed because he hated her "soulful affectation," except it now includes a Very Important Public Service Announcement about religion, and I'm so glad he's chosen to grace us with his insights: "They get terribly upset / when you question their sacred texts / written by woman-hating epileptics [...] and how's this for irony, their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs!" Basically Misty is the stereotype of every smug, entitled white male personified; he's the most obnoxious musician alive in America today, bar none.
Khalid: American Teen (RCA)
Teens! We love 'em, right? This 19 year-old Texan -- he sounds it too, introducing a rural drawl into his anthemic R&B -- senses something universal in stories of trying to get the weed smell out of his car, but his songs are catchy and deeply uninteresting runs through a world that seems to be explored in shorthand. In fact, it often feels like post-adolescent life defined by writers, producers, executives old enough to remember the month in which Khalid was born, because that's what it is. The kid's trying -- I like "8TEEN" -- but he's drowned out by synergy.
Gas: Narkopop (Kompakt) [r]
Wolfgang Voigt's acid-stoked ambient goes back decades now, and he's something of an expert at filling up a quiet, tense room -- his lengthy return (78:39) feels far shorter than it is. It's a little scary sometimes and never either wholly sumptuous or repellent.
Kendrick Lamar: DAMN. (Interscope) [hr]A three-year gap ensued after the near-masterpiece good kid, m.A.A.d city, but DAMN. in turn marks three consecutive years with a major new project from Lamar, probably at the moment the most beloved male performer of popular music in the country, and the rock star upon whom all eyes and ears are most universally cast right now. DAMN. is a more erratic collection in terms of its consistency than the supposed throwaway LP untitled unmastered., and its rundown of post-fame pratfalls, doubts and modest boasts and self-assessment with shades of Biblical apocalypse doesn't have the conceptual death of To Pimp a Butterfly, but it's his first album since Section.80 that, for all its consternation about stardom and the maddening state of the country, is equally concerned with delivering the goods for his increasingly huge audience. It's yet another gathering of incredibly evocative performances, hooks, features and ideas -- inventively produced too. All the tracks are immediate, coming faster and lingering longer than any previous apart from "King Kunta." It's easier to pick out the moments you want to hold permanently at your side than it was on his other records, and this time they are mostly not moments but songs -- the two trap singles produced by Mike Will, the Marvin Gaye-like BadBadNotGood collaboration "LUST." and the glorious Alchemist production "FEAR." -- with the exception of the moment-defining finale of "BLOOD.," a ghostly "The Gift"-like narrative about an unprompted murder, when a sample of two FNC pundits decrying the lyrics of the BLM anthem "Alright" dissolves into Lamar's undaunted freak-flag intro to "DNA." The only misstep is an exceedingly ordinary love song (entitled "LOVE.") with a guest vocal from the anonymous Zacari Pacaldo. There's something uncommonly comforting about an artist as trusted and righteous as Lamar serving commentary about the last few months in our lives -- "We all woke up, tryin' to tune to the daily news / looking for confirmation hoping election wasn't true / all of us worried, all of us buried and the feeling's deep / none of us married to his proposal, makes us feel cheap / still and sad, distraught and mad, tell the neighbor about it / bet they agree, parade the streets with your voice proudly / time passing, things change / revertin' back to our daily programs, stick in our ways" -- mirroring Kate Tempest's prediction of this narrative in "Tunnel Vision," but because of said daily programs, the words that sing out with the most power are those in which Lamar tries to process everything that's happened to him personally and gives conflicted perspective: "I feel like the whole world want me to pray for 'em / But who the fuck prayin' for me?"
Robyn Hitchcock (Yep Roc) [r]
It's almost never acknowledged what a versatile singer Hitchcock is; from Underwater Moonlight right up to this third album for Yep Roc, he can fill in almost any of your blanks from the scope of new wave, British Invasion and power pop influences that define him. Here he's John Cale, here Tom Petty, here Ray Davies, and always with a wit and a sweet lilt whose irresistibility defies his reputation as an off-center quack. There's no song here to match "The Ghost in You" from 2014, his strongest composition in decades, but it's more consistently appealing than The Man Upstairs and the stirring lullaby "1970 in Aspic" will remind you why you care what he's up to.
Ibibio Sound Machine: Uyai (Merge) [hr]Props to Merge, newly down an Arcade Fire and several Spoons, for replacing them with a Nigerian-by-way-of-London musical collective whose output is all but unclassifiable; cathartic opener "Give Me a Reason" is as beholden to techno and funk as it is to West African polyrhythms, and this cornucopia of influences, beautifully redefining the narrative of what comprises folk music from the ground up, continues throughout to make this an engaging modern example of traditionalism shot through with pleasure and paranoia, a welcome return to worldbeat aspirations without the soul-crushing commercial imperative. Singer Eno Williams, her voice ice and fire, is a master storyteller and raconteur, and a disco superstar (see "The Pot Is on Fire"). An undeniable thrill, the party record of 2017.
Valerie June: The Order of Time (Concord) [hr]Why did you first come to love Americana, or alt-country or alt-folk or whatever the vogue term is, when you came across it? Presumably because it was music that could sound both sophisticated and comfortably effortless; folk embraces the strange individual quirk in its mainstream while other genres place it on the fringes. But like country music itself, this world is now dominated by what Thom Yorke called "fridge buzz," a deadening obligation for a certain sound and feeling above all else that has gradually rendered several careers, frankly, pointless -- listen to Great Lake Swimmers' catalog, album by album, for a depressing example. So far, however, Memphis singer-songwriter Valerie June has pushed against the coffee bar NPR morass (though no doubt they are more than happy to embrace her) to write and produce material that feels entirely divorced from time (its central preoccupation) and from outside motivations. This succeeds beautifully; it's unspeakably moving, lovely music that will make you want to shut out and forget everything else. June's stunning, unique vocals are a Daniel Johnston-style attack on radio dross with their Billie Holiday-Joanna Newsom cadences, and the songs are ethereal, immediate, monochromatic, relaxed and warm without a trace of constraint to their lovely spareness. The first two cuts will convince you -- they seem, lyrically and musically, far older than June's 35 years -- and while "Shakedown" and "Got Soul" need their complete context to achieve their proper roles as climactic triumphs, you won't need any setup to fall into the quiet bliss of "Two Hearts" and "Slip Slide on By."
***
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
Karriem Riggins: Headnod Suite (Stones Throw): nearly thirty breakdowns from Detroit-born jazz/hip hop drummer-producer, not Donuts but fun
Oddisee: The Iceberg (Mello Music): twelve good and true moments-in-time of consciousness
Anohni: Paradise (Secretly Canadian EP): I didn't write in for track seven but maybe I should
ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES: (in addition to Gas' Narkopop above)
Sherwood & Pinch: Man vs. Sofa (On-U)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Freddie Gibbs: You Only Live 2wice
* Charly Bliss: Guppy
Jacques Greene: Feel Infinite
Kelly Lee Owens
Spiral Stairs: Doris & the Daggers
Hauschka: What If
Saltland: A Common Truth
Lydia Ainsworth: Darling of the Afterglow
Orchestra Baobob: Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng
Goldfrapp: Silver Eye
Les Amazones D'Afrique: Republique Amazone
Rodney Crowell: Close Ties
IFE: IIII + IIII
Joey Bada$$: All-Amerikkkan Bada$$
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan: Neuk Wight Delhi All Stars
Actress: AZD
REJECTS:
Stormzy: Gang Signs & Prayer [NYIM]
Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Navigator [NYIM]
Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble: Find Me Finding You [NYIM]
Creeper: Eternity, in Your Arms
Craig Finn: We All Want the Same Things
The Moonlandingz: Interplanetary Class Classics
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Damage and Joy
Jake Xerxes Fussell: What in the Natural World
British Sea Power: Let the Dancers Inherit the Party
Pharmakon: Contact [NYIM]
Mastodon: Emperor of Sand
Pile: A Hairshirt of Purpose
Leela James: Did It for Love [NYIM]
Happyness: Write In
Ulver: The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Andrew Combs: Canyons of My Mind
Timber Timbre: Sincerely, Future Pollution
Wire: Silver/Lead
Future Islands: The Far Field
Jeb Loy Nichols: Country Hustle
Fionn Regan: The Meetings of the Waters
Part Chimp: Iv
Woods: Love Is Love
Ron Sexsmith: The Last Rider
Tara Jane O'Neil [NYIM]
Joe Goddard: Electric Lines
Angaleena Presley: Wrangled
Ray Davies: Americana
OLD RECORDS RATED (NOT REVIEWED) THIS MONTH:
The Avett Brothers: Mignonette (Ramseur 2004) [-]
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