MUSIC 2020:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield

December 27, 2021

GENERAL COMMENTS

    The year was 2020, and soon a plague settled over the world—yes, TikTok.  This annoying little “social network” mushroomed into the third-fastest-growing “brand” of the year, surpassed only by Zoom and NBCUniversal’s Peacock, and by late in 2021, it had reportedly surpassed Google as the most “popular” (i.e., visited) site on the World Wide Web.  Proving two things:  1) today’s youth have an insatiable appetite for filming themselves doing stupid or pointless stuff; 2) they are unbothered by the app’s Chinese ownership and accusations that it has helped the Chinese Communist Party spy on and censor commentary critical of the party/government’s actions in Xinjiang and other spheres of controversy, thus serving as an instrument of repression.

    Even without the pandemic, this would have been a fairly grim year in terms of music.  Retailers and recorded music generally continue to be embattled, swallowed whole by Amazon.com and by Spotify and its ilk.  I am still not streaming anything, and apart from listening to the occasional sample sent to me via SoundCloud, plus of course YouTube and a limited diet of Internet radio, I do not experience music digitally at all, which puts me out of step with the way the vast majority of songs are “consumed” these days.  Even established artists struggle to make a living in this adverse ecosystem, and success seems more and more unrelated to talent and more to the luck of the draw in terms of what goes viral.  Chalk it up to the usual grumblings of someone who just turned sixty before publishing this—for my cohort, most of what dominates popular media is completely irrelevant to our lives, as we move about listening to iHeartRadio stations that pander to our demographic with tunes that rarely predate 1970 and never go past 1995 (and which in turn drove our parents around the bend).

    Thanks to Covid-19 spoiling everybody’s lives, if not doing far worse to them, I only saw one musical performance of note, apart from perhaps one Carnegie Hall subscription concert, before curtains came down everywhere in March.  That was Ravi Coltrane’s group at the Jazz Standard in February; the Jazz Standard closed its doors for good in December and now exists only to offer virtual concert series, which seems like weak tea.  Outdoor performances came back to a limited extent in the summer, but I found the restrictions entailed in going to them stifling and kept away.

 

Ravi Coltrane; photo courtesy of Jazz Times.

    Notable passings in the world of music in 2020 included, prominently, those who perished from the SARS-COV-2 virus itself.  There is no shortage of examples, but foremost in my mind are Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and the well-known and versatile producer (and Saturday Night Live veteran) Hal Willner, both early victims of the disease as it ripped through New York City and environs in April.  Other notable passings included the legendary Little Richard, John Prine, Helen Reddy, Charley Pride, Bill Withers, Kenny Rogers, Eddie Van Halen, Charlie Daniels, Florian Schneider, Juliette Greco, Ennio Morricone, Tony Allen, Mac Davis, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Johnny Nash, Bob Shane, Justin Townes Earle, Willie Torres, Andy Gill, Chynna, Jorge Santana, Vera Lynn, Freddy Cole, Peter Green, and Trini Lopez; from the stage world, Ann Reinking, Terrence McNally; Rebecca Luker, and Nick Cordero; from jazz, Johnny Mandel, Claudio Roditi, Jimmy Heath, McCoy Tyner, Claude Bolling; Wallace Roney, Ellis Marsalis, Bucky Pizzarelli, Lee Konitz, Jimmy Cobb, Stanley Crouch, Frank Kimbrough, and Gary Peacock; from the classical and opera sphere, Mirella Freni, Krzysztof Penderecki, Charles Wuorinen, Leon Fleisher, Jaap Schröder, Barry Tuckwell, Lynn Harrell, Rosalind Elias, Julian Bream, and Peter Serkin.

 
    My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2020, to Tzameret Fuerst for suggesting the Other Lives record, to my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Ariel, for their support, and to my partner, Melissa, for her encouragement and infinite patience with my absorption in this project.  Once again, she will not have to endure my holing up in the basement on New Year’s Eve, practically to the ball drop from Times Square, finishing the survey.

    Perhaps related to the pandemic slump, I was drawing from an even smaller pool of pop and rock records (just 19) in 2020 than 2019 (20), fewer than in any year since I began putting this survey out publicly via Blogger in 2007.  Whereas 2019 was a strong year in spite of the small sample size, its successor year, not so much.  I liked a number of offerings, none of them unreservedly, though.  Album of the Year honors go to Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien for his engaging first solo venture, followed closely by a Toronto band whose ridiculous name belies its talent.  New female voices of note were Helen Deland of Montreal and Russia’s Lucidvox.

    My list of the Top Ten (of the pops) for the year follows:

1.    EOB, Earth
2.    Holy F**k, Deleter
3.    Doves, The Universal Want
4.    Helena Deland, Someone New
5.    Tame Impala, The Slow Rush
6.    Lucidvox, We Are
7.    Other Lives, For Their Love
8.    Songhoy Blues, Optimisme
9.    Tobacco, Hot Wet & Sassy
10.    Sylvan Esso, Free Love

 

     ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

EOB, Earth (Capitol Records)—As a member of Radiohead, Ed O’Brien has been a shadowy presence in the popular imagination:  second guitarist to Jonny Greenwood, backup vocalist to Thom Yorke.  But he has always had distinctive musical ideas, at least some of which he felt did not fit in with the band environment.  With Earth, he steps out on his own, with the help of a few musician friends.  It should not surprise anyone who follows Radiohead that this is a quiet, unassuming record for the most part, self-effacing to a fault, with lots of acoustic guitar heard nearly unadorned.  Not entirely, though.  The thoroughly engaging opening track, “Shangri-La,” is upbeat and electronic.  Light at first, with a clockwork beat, it adopts a grittier rock groove for the chorus, with Portishead’s Adrian Utley joining O’Brien on guitar for added muscle.  One can readily hear how O’Brien’s falsetto would mesh with Yorke’s in Radiohead, but for the chorus he moves back into his normal range, where he shows himself to be a capable singer.  Eventually, the acidic chorus takes over the song and rides it to its conclusion.  “Banksters,” a coruscating track that also manages to avoid excessive drama, was written in the wake of the financial crisis in 2009.  Although it was composed several years before the guitarist moved his family to Brazil for a year, it is the most “Brazilian” composition on the disc, far more so than “Brasil,” aided by the berimbau of Marcelo S. Silva as well as other percussion like woodblock and snare drum.  The verse lament about misconduct in the financial sphere is set over guitar chords that droop down the scale, while the chorus intones portentously, in syncopated pairs, “Where did all the money go?” before shifting into a long coda about “breaking free.”  The album’s most danceable (and longest) number, “Olympik” flows smoothly, with splendid arrangements by the record’s producer, Mark “Flood” Ellis (who won a Grammy for his work with U2 on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in 2006), even if the chorus strikes me as unoriginal—O’Brien playing it safe by reaching for an off-the-shelf musical trope.  The aforementioned “Brasil” begins softly, with a dreamy theme for voice and acoustic guitar but shifts character partway, picking up a steady dance beat and cycling synth chords that cast the opening’s lamentations (notwithstanding a certain triteness in the lyrics) into sharp relief, like a four-minute-plus electronic refrain:  the key signature and the general downcast mood are the same, yet everything else changed.  “Deep Days” draws on the blues, with a harmonic setting that puts me in mind of the Linda Ronstadt version of “You’re No Good” that was a smash in 1974-75.  “Sail On,” a dreamy piece with lots of undulating reverb and no beat, once more calls on Utley to add his guitar (acoustic this time) to O’Brien’s.  The record ends with a brief duet between O’Brien and fellow English singer Laura Marling, “Cloak of the Night”; its folky acoustic chord progressions and paired male/female vocals are reminiscent of Buck Curran (see the 2016 and 2018 music surveys).  Marling also appears on ‘Mass,” a kind of plainchant filigreed with acoustic guitar, buzzy undertones, and a Radiohead-ish bridge section (bridge to nowhere, as the song then ends quickly) with otherworldly pulsing and a spectral chorus.  Though Earth is not as profound or as viscerally stimulating as it might have been, it is still a substantial achievement for O’Brien in his first solo venture and will appeal to a broad spectrum of listeners well beyond the bounds of Radiohead’s considerable, if eclectic, fan club.    A

Sample song  “Shangri-La”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Djc5z-EMg

 

    And the rest . . .

BBSITTERS CLUB, BBSitters Club & Party (Hausu Mountain)—The Chicago Reader described this band as “rock pranksters,” and if it were only that, BBSitters Club & Party would actually get a higher mark from me.  The debut from BBSitters Club, a group founded by Max Allison (“Shades Bassman”) and Doug Kaplan (“Stogna Balogna”), is hardly a tour de force but plenty fun in its lighthearted moments.  The problems occur when the band waxes more serious.  Because the record was produced by the pair’s own label, Hausu Mountain, on the cheap, the vocals are not engineered to be as audible as one might wish, and there are no printed lyrics, either.  (Fortunately, or not, Bandcamp has them.)  So meanings get lost or muddled in the mix, which does not help matters when it comes to the more stolid songs, “Same as Before” and “Told Ya.”  At least “Same as Before” has a long, funky guitar lead-in to recommend it.  “Told Ya” takes the form of a slow jam; its long instrumental bridge is leavened with bits of funk but not enough to rescue it from Allman Brothers–style banality.  There is another slow jam on the disc, “Carl Blues,” named after guitarist Charlie Olvera’s band moniker, “Carl Rude.”  It is framed by a conventional twelve-bar blues at either end of the composition, but this is a funkier jam session and goes down much more smoothly.  Between them, the nine-minute “Told Ya” and eight-minute “Carl Blues” take up more than a third of the album’s running time.  “Crazy Horse,” leading off the disc, has the most poetic imagery (“The jester holding court/The magician rides astride the crazy horse”); musically, it is an odd hybrid of the Western-tinged blues rock of Bad Company and the psych-progressivism of Pink Floyd (one can just about hear the final couplet of “Breathe,” from Dark Side of the Moon [1973], in the pre-chorus).  “Cutie Girls” has a clever lyric that is baldly stated (“Meeting cutie girls is why we started this band”) but is otherwise drab and points up the vocal weaknesses and lack of charisma of whoever takes the lead, Allison or Kaplan.  Much perkier, and sillier, is the Zappa-esque “Beef Pizza,” with its high-pitched, gee-whiz, nonsensical verses (“Spring, summer, winter, and fall/For a limited time collect them all!”) and its wah-wah pedals waddling up and down the scale; the more abstract and experimental portions of the song recall the dissonance of King Crimson’s “Cat Food” (1970).  The closer, “Dracula,” has no lyric apart from pealing out the title; it seems a backhanded tribute to the Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein” (1972), with bits of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla” (1977) thrown in, and even allusions to Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” (1976) and Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” (1967) at the end.  Silliest of all is “Joel.”  A shout-out to the band’s engineer, Joel Berk, it is an inside joke of sorts, yet the band thought enough of this particular riff to include it three times, on an album with just ten tracks total.  The original lays out the pattern:  to a shoegaze chime in the rhythm guitar, the lead guitar sketches out astral-plane arpeggiations, over which the band shouts out “JOEL!”  The first reprise of “Joel” is a little more restrained and syncopated, whereas the beepy guitars of “Joel Reprise Reprise” let loose entirely with a glory that is only hinted at toward the conclusion of the first “Joel” (sigh).  In order to break out, beyond being a Chicago-area bar band, BBSitters Club should fully commit to its pranksterism.    B+

Sample song  “Beef Pizza” (alas, no videos are available for this record):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dcTzqJbUq8
 

BDRMM, Bedroom (Sonic Cathedral)—Shoegaze for the sullen, bdrmm’s full-length debut impressed quite a few critics, including Rhys Buchanan of NME.  I found it underwhelming, less haunting than half-formed.  The faster compositions fail to resonate, and the slow ones really drag.  Lyrics are sparse and give the impression of being one side of an endless and futile argument from a couples therapy session.  There are the makings of a decent shoegaze record in here; it is just that bdrmm is too lazy or unambitious or lacking in creative enterprise to put flesh on the bones of these songs.  And atmospherics will only take a group so far.  The two instrumentals, “Momo” and “Unhappy,” are typical of the band’s modus operandi, each content to ride out a single motif for three or four minutes with minimal chord changes, let alone genuine development, a pity considering the intriguingly Interpol-ish intro to “Unhappy.”  On the other tracks, Ryan Smith’s voice is androgynously bleating and rather wan, which matches Bedroom’s general disposition but is not a big selling point.  At his best, he can emulate the non-falsetto register of Jónsi of Sigur Rós.  “Push/Pull” opens with an ingratiating guitar theme that is heard throughout the tune, but the sung verse that follows is utterly forgettable, a cypher.  A modest advancement happens with the following song, “A Reason to Celebrate”:  an actual chorus the listener can latch onto readily brightens the picture—otherwise my complaint would be the same as in “Push/Pull.”  The power guitar opening of “If…” leads to yet another cul-de-sac, a wispy, plaintive verse/chorus that is no match for the instrumentation.  On “Is That What You Wanted to Hear?” the guitar lead-in is more fluttery and spectral, and the sung portion comes closer to meeting it on its own terms, though it is still pretty weak stuff:  an A for scene setting, a C for plot dynamics.  The surf guitar and breathy, yearning vocals of “Gush” and “Forget the Credits” echo the Brooklyn band Drums, perhaps an unusual lodestar for a band from Hull.  Otherwise, we are left with a couple of beguiling special effects:  the Doppler effect on the guitars at the end of “Happy,” the sampled background voices above woozy feedback to close out “Unhappy.”  Not much of a claim on listeners’ attention when everyone is distracted by the newest shiny object.    B

Sample song  “Is That What You Wanted to Hear?”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-fwuaYXv3M

BUSCABULLA, Regresa (Ribbon Music)—Dreamy, loungy, electronic Latin pop, Regresa (The Return) shows the influences of the producers with whom this husband-and-wife team, Luis Alfredo del Valle and Raquel Berrios, have spent time in the studio previously, notably Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) and Roberto Carlos Lange (Helado Negro, who provided the orchestral arrangement for “Club Tú y Yo”; in the album cover above and in the video link below, the pair even dress in the outlandish costumes that typify Helado Negro’s stage act).  Patrick Wimberly of Chairlift helped with the production of this, Buscabulla’s first full-length record.  The pair wanted to convey the emotions tied to their homecoming, to a Puerto Rico walloped by natural disasters and crumbling as a result of malign neglect, after a number of years in Brooklyn (where else?), but that is far from obvious in the sparse, romantically inclined lyrics on this slight album, barely thirty-one minutes long.  There is a certain poignancy to melodies like “Club Tú y Yo” (Club You and I), “Manda Fuego” (Summon Fire), and “Nydia,” yet the songs do not stick around long enough to make much impact.  It is as if del Valle and Berrios were concerned about wearing out their welcome in what are at times more vignettes than full-blooded compositions.  “La Fiebre” (Fever), barely a minute’s duration, shows the touch of Hynes in its relaxed neo–rhythm & blues sensibility, even though he has no credits on the record.  Other tunes recall older Latin or partly Latin acts such as Si*Sé or Supreme Beings of Leisure, moody, downtempo pieces.  But the opener, Vámono” (Let’s Go) is faster and crisper, a march with a “drumline,” note-warping modulations, and deep bass undertones.  Still, the song’s lyric barely touches (one mention of the verb “exploit”) on the themes that Buscabulla mentioned in interviews, such as lack of opportunity for most islanders.  “Manda Fuego” begins with a sampling of a street preacher, a sign of the growing religious fanaticism that concerns the couple; although the song takes the form of a supplication, it really seems to be about conquering one’s own demons without the need for guidance from ecclesiastical authorities.  The passionately warm “Nydia,” co-written by (among others) Nydia Caro and featuring her own voice midstream, is one of the few numbers that feels genuinely fleshed out, floating on a sonic cushion of humming instrumental sound whose arrangements and harmonies recall Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love” (1986).  Things get a little spikier with “NTE,” which stands for No Te Equivoques” (Make No Mistake); the song lyric is defiant (if not the tune itself) in a sense of “I will be who I want to be and will not apologize for it.”  Berrios’s voice is a little too kewpie-ish for my liking, but she is otherwise a capable vocalist.  And this is a competently executed record, never less than pleasant listening and indeed affecting at its best.  It just seems ironic that a duo that named itself Buscabulla, which translates as “looking for trouble,” created such a laid-back, impressionistic record rather than mustering the intensity to stir things up truly.    B+

Sample song  “Vámono”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weIwiyBWeWI

HELENA DELAND, Someone New (Luminelle Recordings/Fat Possum Records)—Despite having what is possibly the most boring and inert music video ever produced (see the link below), this is a rock-solid full-length debut for the Canadian singer/songwriter, who looks to Joni Mitchell and Angel Olsen, among others, for inspiration.  Low key and understated throughout, Someone New traffics in folk without managing to sound particularly folky; while Deland at times accompanies herself with little more than her guitar (viz. the final two tracks:  the stately tone poem “Clown Neutral” and the hushed, spectral, arpeggio-laden “Fill the Rooms”), most songs have enough of an electronic lattice to reinforce the rock idiom.  The ethos is confessional, reflective, wistful—rescued from glumness or self-pity by a pithy observation or wry comment, just as unexpected chord changes lift the music above the quotidian.  She has a pliable and versatile voice, pretty when she wants it to be, breathy or mincing or quavery as the situation calls for.  The title track, which gets first billing, begins in a vein of quiet, internalized reproach, but Deland has no intention of wallowing; rather, her imagination transports her to a higher plane even as the music acquires a beat and takes off at a brisk clip, the minor-mode progressions of the opening sublimating into something more neutral in tone.  The thrumming bass and measured electropop of the following song, “Truth Nugget,” resemble fellow Canadians Broken Social Scene in mellow mode, whereas “Comfort, Edge” bears striking similarities, in the starkness of its vulnerability and the soft hooting of its chorus, to yet another Canadian performer, Feist (a sometime contributor to Broken Social Scene), particularly in her Metals phase (see the 2011 music survey).  Deland has learned from Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” (1981) the dramatic effect of the sudden introduction of percussion in a song that, up to that point, had no crisply defined beat, and she uses it to her benefit in “Dog,” a song about craving affection, puppy-like, from someone for whose attentions there seems to be a lot of competition.  “Pale” is striking in its dreamy, gauzy, smoky, quasi-psychedelic tonal colors, swirls of several shades of brown and mustard (the title notwithstanding).  This highly inventive tune packs a lot of moving parts into a short piece:  shoegaze-style guitar strumming, a brief stop-time sequence, the insertion of a powerful bass guitar/drum ostinato partway through, yet it is the offbeat chromaticism of both vocals and arrangements that sticks with the listener most.  The muted but intriguing tonal palette finds its way, less showily, into the easygoing lilt of songs from the latter part of the tracklist, “Lilz” and “Mid-Practice.”  The central track, “The Walk Home,” is the album’s lone instrumental, a serene harmonic kernel for guitar and bass, dressed up in variations and given emotional depth by the cello accompaniment.  My one quibble with Someone New, an apropos title for introducing a novel and original voice on the music scene, is the rhythmic and textural constancy of the songs; the album would have been still more compelling if Deland surprised us and shook things up with “something new” midstream.    A/A-

Sample song  “Someone New”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2Neulrlvnw

DOVES, The Universal Want (Heavenly Recordings/Virgin EMI Records)—After an eleven-year hiatus, Doves made a comeback well worth the wait with The Universal Want.  The new album is richly melodic, with the sort of stratospheric sonorities that northern English (as well as Scottish and Scandinavian) bands pull off brilliantly.  Consonant almost to a fault, the band’s smoothness behind the voice of Jimi Goodwin can call forth Coldplay, but in its grittier moments, it is closer in spirit to fellow Mancunians Elbow (see the 2019 music survey).  Nothing on The Universal Want hits with the force of Elbow’s “White Noise White Heat,” but then, Doves is not so interested in being a modern-day Moody Blues (or Don DeLillo, for that matter).  Each of the first three tracks is impressive in its own way.  “Carousels” begins with a shimmery electronic wash with background voices and wah-wah bass like something from the trip-hop group Olive from twenty years ago.  The broad theme that emerges from this hushed, surreal intro is very much in Chris Martin/Coldplay mode, if sumptuously brocaded with chiming, arpeggiated guitar harmonics, but a secondary theme, perhaps not as extensively worked through as it might have been, casts a flickering shadow over the brightness, even as the return to the original demonstrates tight meshwork with the subtheme.  Incidentally, this song is one of two in this year’s music survey (see the Gorillaz entry below) to have made use of a drum track from Tony Allen, who died in April 2020.  “I Will Not Hide,” apart from the surprise of the “helium voices” chorus at the beginning and the bridge, is vigorously strummed by Jez Williams, like a fast-folk version of a troubadour song, more businesslike and dourly determined than romantic in mood.  According to drummer Andy Williams (Jez’s twin), “Broken Eyes” dates to the time of the band’s previous record, Kingdom of Rust (2009); it is one of those compositions that seems unremarkable until the chorus bursts into full florescence, revealing multiple shadings that give the tune its poignancy and potency.  Taking its title, perhaps, from Robyn Hitchcock’s I Often Dream of Trains (1984) and some of its chord resolutions from “Imagine” by John Lennon (1971), “Cathedrals of the Mind” makes use of various devices—skittering cycles of synth notes, dubbing in of background voices, a saxophone riff at the bridge—to back an almost bawling primary melody, but it is the searing long tones behind Goodwin’s vocal that make the song stick (OK, maybe the band listened to the Moody Blues after all).  “Cycles of Hurt” opens with a computerized voice much like that of Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” from OK Computer (1997) but shifts quickly to an urgent and plaintive motif that shows there is beauty even in woundedness.  The title track recapitulates a concept (grasping desire that can never be satiated) from Depeche Mode’s “Everything Counts” (1983) in a less obvious and more philosophical manner—also in a more wrenching and less poppy tune.  Even in a song I am less taken with, “Mother Silverlake” (sung by Jez Williams, I believe), there are some mind-blowing keyboard harmonies.  The album ends with the softer, dreamier, spectral “Forest House,” set off from the other tracks in mood and texture, earthier apart from its electronic hum.  Many bands’ attempts to recapture the old magic fail miserably; Doves has done it splendidly on its own terms.        A/A-

Sample song  “Cathedrals of the Mind”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBWsg9MtQuM

 

FOUR TET, Sixteen Oceans (Text Records)—There are sixteen tracks on Sixteen Oceans, and if each song is an “ocean,” some are fairly shallow while certain others are oceanic only in a Lilliputian frame of reference.  Never mind; even if Kieran Hebden has done better work as Four Tet, there is still enough strong material, particularly up front, to make it a worthwhile listening experience.  The essence of these electronic compositions is trancelike repetition of fundamental elements, set to club beats; the best of Sixteen Oceans, such as “Love Salad,” “Baby,” or “Teenage Birdsong,” subtly builds off these cycling snippets.  Hearing “Love Salad,” the longest composition, unfold, from cantering drum pattern to chiming long tones to churning harmonics, is like watching an animated film in which the artist sketches in the visual features one at a time.  “Baby” takes a few sung phrases from the magnificent Ellie Goulding and dices and overlays them to thicken the sauce, garnishing with crepuscular synth chords and a dubstep breakbeat; the resulting mixture is surprisingly affecting.  “Romantics” has a mourning dove quality to its drooping glass harmonica and (probably synthesized) harp flourishes and zither-like arpeggiations.  The opener, “School,” plumbs no profundities but does sweep the listener along on a current of brisk tempo and resounding major fifths and intermediate chords.  There is birdsong interspersed throughout the record, although, strangely, not on the pumping, pipingly melodic “Teenage Birdsong,” which is the one tune that predates the record, having been previously issued as a single.  In fact, several tracks carry head-scratching titles:  “1993 Band Practice,” one of several very short entries, sounds like no band practice I ever witnessed.  “Something in the Sadness” comes off as glibly hollow rather than soul searching or heart-rending.  “Insect Near Piha Beach” is an impressive achievement, its harp sunbursts—no doubt inspired by Indian ragas—positively gorgeous, yet I wonder about the heavy percussion that pervades most of the track—even a giant morpho butterfly from Central America would not beat its wings with that kind of force.  “Bubbles at Overlook 25th March 2019” barely lasts longer than it takes to recite its title, but at least it does sound suitably bubbly, and “Harpsichord” does showcase the titular instrument, if hardly to its greatest advantage.  The best of the album’s second half are the reflective, tremulous “Green” and “4T Recordings,” another India-tinged selection with its soft, low drone and incantatory female vocals.  One of the frustrating things about Text Records’ minimal documentation on the CD cover is that we have no clue as to who is singing; aside from Goulding, there are no musical credits at all (beyond Hebden himself as producer); this is true of “Romantics” as well.  “Mama Teaches Sanskrit,” the final number, gurgling upwellings of familial nostalgia, presumably samples Hebden’s own mother’s voice, giving language instruction to a child, who repeats what she declaims.  Four Tet can get away with coasting on various tracks because elsewhere the willingness to experiment is alive and well, in the hands of a master sound collagist, Hebden.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Baby”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1gVxKhdGPs

GORILLAZ, Gorillaz Present: Song Machine, Season One (Parlophone/ Warner Records)—Going from cartoon band doing its own thing to cartoon band backing a jukebox album has been anything but jarring for Gorillaz.  For one thing, cartoon characters like 2-D and Murdoc never complain about working conditions; for another, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s creation has a long track record of working with guest artists—here, they have merely amped it up to every song.  Is it good?  Let me say rather that it is not bad, for the most part, smoothly listenable if hardly soul stirring, with the rapping kept within tolerable limits.  The first of what promises to be an ongoing series, compiling “episodes” released monthly on Internet channels, manages to sound very much like the Gorillaz of yore, in part because on a number of tracks, the “featured” artists are not actually given as much prominence as one might reasonably expect.  Why invite St. Vincent (Annie Clark) onto a bouncy track, “Chalk Tablet Towers,” for instance, if she is essentially going to serve as a backing singer to Albarn?  On the other side of the ledger, some tracks sound very much like the work of their guest stars, notably “Aries,” with Peter Hook and Georgia (Georgia Rose Harriet Barnes), which is in the mode of Hook’s band New Order, with its simple melody, prefab disco rhythms, and burbling guitars.  “Désolé” is another dance-friendly tune, lifted beyond the quotidian by the alto filigree of Mali’s Fatoumata Diawara and its lively balafon, zither, string, and horn arrangements.  Some of the record’s pairings, when there is more than one guest performer, are quite odd:  Elton John, a pop icon who is sung drama encapsulated, with the mediocre, Auto-Tuned interjections of 6lack (Ricardo Valdez Valentine, Jr.) on the limply reflective number “Pink Phantoms.”  Or the sensuous Caribbean vocal stylings of newcomer Roxani Arias, coupled incongruously with the grime hip-hop of Kano (Kane Brett Robinson) on the gently soulful “Dead Butterflies,” which is closest in spirit to the work of Blood Orange (see the 2013, 2016, and 2018 music surveys).  The most striking vocal performance on the double-disc (the first disc is much longer than the second, with eleven tracks to just six) comes from a South African performer I knew nothing about, Moonchild Sanelly (Sanelisiwe Twisha).  She does little more than grainy patter on “With Love to an Ex,” and yet, she exudes an indefinable, quiet magnetism—her enunciation is exquisite.  No doubt, part of the value of a jukebox presentation such as this is the exposure to unfamiliar acts, both the ones to which you might gravitate and those you would tend to avoid in future, say, Octavian (Octavian Oliver Godji), who can barely carry a tune and is lifeless as a rapper, simply horrendous on “Friday 13th.”  “With Love to an Ex” is a deceptively sweet title for a track whose arrangements are balefully clangorous, in line with what Moonchild Sanelly terms her “future ghetto punk.”  It breaks up a succession of downtempo tracks to kick off the second disc, beginning with the longest on the album and the one that sets up the most appealing groove from a purely musical standpoint.  “Opium” is skitteringly percussive with rippling arpeggiated keyboards, but the Atlanta hip-hop duo Earthgang quickly deflates any sense of elation with a blankly chipper vocal, though it does ultimately resolve to a pleasing chorus.  The final track (note that the Japanese deluxe edition contains a bonus instrumental called “Taxi to 80s Reykjavik,” which can be accessed via YouTube), “How Far?” is a pumped-up, mafioso tough-guy act embodied by the U.K. grime rapper Skepta (Joseph Junior Adenuga), with drumming from the Afrobeat legend Tony Allen, in one of Allen’s last performances before his sudden death from an aneurysm in April 2020.  This track is separated from the similarly doomy “With Love to an Ex” by “MLS,” whose helium vocals from a Japanese female quartet called Chai, backed up by rapping from JPEG Mafia (Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks), and mewling melody are way too steeped in eighties boy band New Edition for my tastes.  The first disc is inaugurated by a surprisingly strained vocal by the oh-so-smooth Cure crooner Robert Smith, “Strange Timez,” whose opening phrases evoke the “welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends” segment of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Karn Evil 9” (1st Impression, Part 2, from 1973) before moving on to a sci-fi-inspired melodic core powered by a spin-cycle pattern of descending minor scales.  I have never been a fan of Beck (Hansen), but never mind, “Valley of the Pagans,” the follow-up to “Strange Timez,” is appealingly swingy and energetic even with Beck’s vocals in the mix.  The song that sounds most like “classic” Gorillaz is “Pac-Man,” as dreamy and ethereal as anything Albarn had composed for Blur, yet with a beepy, street-level energy and funk attitude to ground it in the here and now, not to mention the rapping of Schoolboy Q (Quincy Matthew Hanley).  It might be good strategy for Gorillaz to commit to hooking up with so many other acts, as the band’s own music has not been truly gripping for at least a decade; even so, Albarn and the cartoon characters offer enough entertainment value to make them worth keeping up with.    B+

 
Sample song  “Désolé” (featuring Fatoumata Diawara):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLKZKmdZEjM

 

HOLY F**K, Deleter (Holy EF Music)—Stupid album title, even stupider group name, yet in a down year for music across the board (thanks, COVID-19!), Toronto’s Holy F**k put out one of the best releases.  I was surprised to learn that this was officially the band’s fifth full-length record.  The music is electronica, but the foursome by design avoids many of the production tricks that are standard in the genre (laptops, tape loops, etc.), while incorporating various unconventional devices to make sound (“implements as instruments”) along with the guitar, keys, and drums.  Deleter is primarily geared to the dancefloor, with the big, deep beats characteristic of house music.  It also features guest vocalists on several tracks, and it is no coincidence that these are the most compelling since the band’s own vocals, from either of the keyboard specialists, Brian Borcherdt (who is actually a guitarist first and foremost but decided not to play the instrument for this band) or Graham Walsh, tend to be rather spectral.  There is at least a touch of the vocal element on each of the nine tracks, including (apparently, hard to distinguish) a bit sung in Swedish by Anna Edwards on “Ruby,” the closer.  The album opens with the comfort of Alexis Taylor’s warm, buttery-smooth tenor, familiar to anyone acquainted with the band Hot Chip.  “Luxe” begins with a zippy, Giorgio Moroder–style repeating keyboard figuration, over which Taylor’s voice comes in tentatively.  Later, the track builds in some long tones in the synthesizers as well as some moany effects, leading to a modest rise in the song’s temperature, though it ends much as it began.  Angus Andrew, the Australian frontman of the Brooklyn band Liars, takes the microphone for the rubbery “Deleters,” which is very much in the spirit of early-eighties synthpop, with its own Moroder-esque motoric rhythm; the vocal element is severely curtailed until the chorus, which Andrew mouths indecipherably in a plaintive falsetto.  The most glittery of these outside singer showcases is “Free Gloss,” throbbing and strobing to the refrain supplied by Pond’s Nicholas Allbrook, another Aussie.  As compelling as the chorus and harmonics are, I only wish the band had devoted more attention to the long instrumental bridge, which, aside from flipping the mode to a dreamier, more benign major, lacks any sense of drama or impetus.  The song ends, oddly, with about ten seconds of strummed acoustic arpeggiations set to rushes of wind, as if imported from an entirely different tune.  “Endless,” the first composition without a guest vocalist, is also one of the few not set to a dance beat; its theme has a serene poignancy, while its metronomic beat is eventually subsumed by buzzy synths and those attenuated, apparitional band vocals.  The “middle” tracks of Deleter—“Moment,” “Near Mint,” and “No Error”—are all rock-solid entries.  “No Error” is filled with stretchy syncopations and processed vocals that sound a little like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon, whereas the shoegaze-y “Near Mint” is characterized by the sighing, descending-scale vocals of Borcherdt/Walsh.  “Moment” trades off between a bass guitar line with an Interpol-ish urgency, more fizzy and tremulous keyboard figurations, and further oddly clipped, barely there vocals.  The album takes a dip in quality toward the end:  “San Sebastian” is the most problematic offering, wild, woolly, clomping, as unruly/dissonant as any Sonic Youth outburst.  “Ruby” is vague and formless for its first half but achieves a certain momentum later, through its percussive attacks and hooty vocals.  I would have liked to see more development of the central instrumental sections of the longer songs; the constancy begins to wear on the listener after a time.  But given the band’s own vocally self-effacing nature, having charismatic dudes like Allbrook, Andrews, and Taylor carry some of the load seems a winning concept.    A/A-

 

Sample song  “Free Gloss (featuring Nicholas Allbrook)”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpzDtzej2qQ

KHRUANGBIN, Mordechai (Dead Oceans/Night Time Stories)—The act of disappearing into a mellow groove starts to wear thin for Khruangbin by its third album, Mordechai.  In one regard, the record is actually more extroverted than its predecessor, Con Todo el Mundo (see the 2018 music survey):  more of its songs have real lyrics, sung by Laura Lee (Ochoa) in her cool, gelatin-smooth, nearly affectless voice.  “Time (You and I)” is uncharacteristically playful and maybe the closest thing this band has ever had to a pop hit.  Snappy and tightly arranged, it percolates rather than really cooks and wears its funk lightly.  Much the same can be said for “Pelota” (Ball), which takes the form of a Latin American folk tune, something we might get from Lila Downs.  But to my (mostly untrained) ear, the guitar accompaniment is akin to West African genres such as soukous rather than the Middle Eastern and South Asian source material that powers Khruangbin’s earlier discs.  The Spanish lyrics are a bit silly but enjoyable all the same.  The third song that is genuinely a sung tune is “So We Won’t Forget,” dreamy, not as funky as the other two, again very West African in the sense of having a rolling, easygoing melody with a simple structure.  This track has an alt-take in “One to Remember,” which comes before it on the tracklist—the song’s bare-bones setting, with just Caribbean-style deep house bass plus reverb and gentle drumming, with Laura Lee singing snippets of the vocal.  The weakest track on the disc is “Dearest Alfred”:  inert, maudlin (“your letter is the best gift”), as mushy and flavorless as overdone cauliflower.  “First Class,” the opening piece, is impressionistic, louchely relaxed in a Supreme Beings of Leisure kind of way, yet the fragmentary images the band conjures are Fantasy Island clichés.  About as sketchily unsatisfying is “If There Is No Question,” culminating in a dreamy, early 1970s–vintage chorus, denatured psychedelia.  “Connaissais de Face” (You Know by Face) is a throwback to the predecessor album in that it has a lot of idle chatter in between its sparse lyric; this gets to be irritatingly gossipy after a time.  The other songs, the instrumental “Father Bird, Mother Bird” and the quasi-instrumental “Shida,” are pleasant enough guitar ruminations but without enough acid to make for striking etchings.  Mordechai has its high points, but the ledger is still tilted toward the dispensable and unmemorable; I had expected more from Khruangbin after Con Todo el Mundo.        B
 

Sample song  “Time (You and I)”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc50wHexbwg

LUCIDVOX, We Are (Glitterbeat Records)—Apt comparisons have been made to Sweden’s Goat (see the 2012, 2014, and 2016 music surveys) for this Russian all-female foursome, making their international debut with We Are.  Both are neo-psychedelic acts that draw on African/Middle Eastern sources.  Goat is wilder and weirder, whereas Lucidvox, more disciplined and with far more capable lead vocals from Alina Evseeva, is still finding its identity.  The Swedish band aligns more closely with North African trance music and West African rhythms, while for the Russians, modal harmonies come naturally from their country’s overlapping heritage with Central Asia and the Caucasus.  One hears modal figurations throughout We Are; these are especially prominent on “Sever,” where they are put through a rigorous workout at different tempo settings.  The album’s prizewinner is its opener, “My Little Star,” which begins with a mystical, foreboding chorus above an undulant synthesizer hum before the guitars let loose in a furious swirl of psychedelic daub and etched patterns of attack.  The chorus reappears above the ruckus of electric strings and is all that remains once the instrumentation dies away.  The intensity and focus of this composition are unmatched, though the final number, “Sirin,” ringing out and drenched in exotic (to our ears) modal scales, comes closest, with bits of flute filigree from Evseeva.  The band’s melodic aspirations are at times eclipsed by a desire to exert raw power, as “Knife,” “Body,” and “Around” demonstrate that the band knows its way around acid rock and metal.  Even on the dreamiest and most poignant of songs, “You Are,” there is a hard metallic edge to its guitar arpeggiations and percussion.  But progressive rock elements find their way into the music in stealth fashion as well.  “Runaway” is something of a departure, self-consciously setting out like a Doors song, with Evseeva’s doomy synthesizer emulating a Hammond organ amid a whir of cymbal brushes.  Yet the plaintive vocals and lachrymose, Dave Douglas–like trumpet ornamentation from guest performer Timur Mizinov take it in a different direction ultimately.  Some tunes get caught in a rut, but they always dig themselves out before it starts to wear on the listener.  Lucidvox’s first foray beyond Moscow might be limited in range, but within those bounds, the band impresses with its musicality, its facility with psychedelia and its offshoots and related genres, and its sheer muscularity.    A-

Sample song  “Runaway”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n0vlaT7lBU

 

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS, Quickies (Nonesuch Records/Warner Music Group)—The centerpiece, as it were, of They Might Be Giants’ 1992 album Apollo 18 was a suite of twenty-one fragmentary “songs” collectively titled “Fingertips,” ranging from only a few seconds to barely a minute in length, designed to sound like bits of advertising jingles and other pop ditties.  Quickies is not so extreme, but the overarching concept is similar, with tunes varying in length from seventeen seconds (“Death Pact [Let’s Make a]”) to 2:35 (“Come, Life, Shaker Life!”).  Like TMBG, Stephin Merritt, the Magnetic Fields founder and songwriter, is a musical magpie, borrowing from various corners of Americana to set the ambience for each mini-composition.  On tracks in which the accordion (of Daniel Handler, better known as the children’s author Lemony Snicket) is used, the music can even come to resemble the accordion-heavy stylings of the early TMBG.  But They Might Be Giants actually encompassed a greater sweep of genres in its foundational records than are used here.  Merritt dabbles in bluegrass (“The Best Cup of Coffee in Tennessee”), metal (“[I Want to Join a] Biker Gang”), Creole blues (“Evil Rhythm”), and throwback psych-rock (“The Biggest Tits in History,” whose very title is a joke because the lyrics concern the raising of titmice), yet the eclectic collection of cigar box instruments and the nearly omnipresent ukulele/banjolele conspire to render the (sometimes deceptively) simple instrumental arrangements stylistically similar across a good portion of the tracklist.  While one can readily appreciate the derivation from source material of different stripes ingrained in the American psyche, and notwithstanding Merritt’s acknowledged compositional genius, in strict musical terms, most of these chamber pieces do not add up to much—they are too spare, too rudimentary, to be more than mere vignettes.  One exception is the through-composed “Come, Life, Shaker Life!” a music box number with intricate string picking and syncopations that almost trick the mind into thinking it is being sung (by Claudia Gonson, I think) in rounds.  Another compositional gem is the wistful, clockwork, Baroque mock-horror of “I Wish I Had Fangs and a Tail.”  Merritt himself sings many of the tunes in his deep baritone, and, in the manner of “the two Johns” (Flansburgh and Linnell) in TMBG with distinct vocal ranges, primarily alternates with Shirley Simms, whose androgynous voice is not at all to my liking; Claudia Gonson sings as well in spots.  Though the songs are entertaining enough even with these cavils, their amusing lyrics and titles are the album’s strong suit.  Robert Christgau, one of the few professional rock critics I respect, said of Quickies:  “28 songs in 48 minutes, too few as clever as you’d hoped, several rather nice, more than that stupider than this very smart man believes.”  That strikes me as unduly harsh.  The closing lament, “I Wish I Were a Prostitute Again,” is hands-down the funniest lyric I have heard in years, and Merritt gets credit for proper use of the subjunctive tense in the title.  Nearly as saucy is “My Stupid Boyfriend,” and “Favorite Bar,” “Kraftwerk in a Blackout,” and “(I Want to Join a) Biker Gang” will also draw chuckles.  Certain compositional choices are puzzling:  Why no actual toy piano on “When She Plays the Toy Piano”?  (In fact, no keyboards of any kind other than synthesizers.)  How come there is only light percussion in “When the Brat Upstairs Got a Drum Kit,” a title that promises more mirth than it delivers?  Why does “Rock ’n’ Roll Guy” not rock at all?  A number of verses are surprisingly nihilistic:  “The Day the Politicians Died,” “Kill a Man a Week” (surely one of the least clever tracks), “Death Pact [Let’s Make a],” “Let’s Get Drunk Again (and Get Divorced).”  Even “Song of the Ant,” a wispy bit for piano and voice, takes its theme from nature documentaries showing grotesquely how parasitic Cordyceps fungi sprout from the heads of terminally infected ants.  The album’s inspirational low point is without doubt the mewling reverie of “I’ve Got a Date with Jesus”; this is set against the soberer “You’ve Got a Friend in Beelzebub” a few tracks later.  The mining of antiquities for Quickies is impressive, a veritable Smithsonian of found sounds reimagined, and yet, as pleasurable as the tour is, it leaves the listener feeling only partially fulfilled.    B+
 

Sample song  “(I Want to Join a) Biker Gang”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0eYO2cg9jA

OTHER LIVES, For Their Love (ATO Records)—The best band to come out of Oklahoma since Flaming Lips?  Could well be the case.  Other Lives has been around since 2004, when it released its first record under the name Kunek; its output has been sparse since then, and I cannot pretend to familiarity with the earlier material.  But any folk rock origins have been somewhat downplayed on the current release in order to chase the neo-psychedelia trend that Flaming Lips itself helped establish.  For Their Love, which was recorded in Oregon (the album cover and video linked to below feature one striking A-frame house), is an odd melding of Interpol and the Moody Blues, stylistically speaking.  The Moody Blues aspect of the record surfaces most in the fourth and eighth tracks, “All Eyes/For Their Love” and “Hey Hey I.”  The instrumental “All Eyes” lead-in has the kind of ear-pleasingly gloppy, easy-listening string arrangements that form the substrate of much of Days of Future Passed (1967), while the title track portion that follows has the pleading, plaintive vocals, sung by Jesse Tabish, and chorus to match the Moody Blues hit “Question” from 1970, set in a hazy blur of keyboards and winds contributing to a compelling ambience, even if the primary line of the refrain is a little weak.  “Hey Hey I” is energetically declarative (about freeing yourself from the demands others put on you) but very hippy-dippy all the same, with its bells and rippling percussion and its pealing one-finger-on-the-keyboard piano serving as a monotone ostinato; it is both rousing and great fun.  The chorus “they only come out at night” would seem a tribute to the Edgar Winter Group.  Tabish comes off like Paul Banks and Interpol particularly at the outset of “Lost Day”—the song has that wiry tension in the electric guitars and portentous vocals characteristic of the New York band, although it eventually drifts to a higher spiritual plane (“lost day, man, for the new-born seeker”).  Not as uncanny in its resemblance, the succeeding song, “Cops,” is nonetheless still in Interpol mode, a carbuncle of gut-twisting remorse expressed in mournful descending-scale keyboard figurations and keening guitar embroidery.  The more maximally produced, Gothic “Nites Out” swirls with vintage Jefferson Airplane psychedelia in its dire modal harmonies but also rocks, Interpol-style, with those tremulous tenor vocals and booming percussion behind a thick scrum of tuned instruments.  Several other songs—“Sound of Violence,” “Dead Language,” “We Wait,” “Sideways”—have more of the kind of Western/folk flavor one might expect from an outfit like this, more acoustic guitar and simpler settings.  The tightly packed triplet figures of the verse portion of “Sideways” strike me as more glib (as do the verses to “Dead Language”) than haunting as intended, but the one-line refrain compensates, as an expression of wonderment at how the object of someone’s affections can knock the lover’s equilibrium askew.  “We Wait” is the one song that carries an undercurrent of Latin rhythms and pop inflections, “cowboy rumba” as Ned Sublette termed it.  “Who’s Gonna Love Us” is a peculiar hybrid, beginning in the progressive vein as a quasi-medieval lay sketched out on piano but quickly gaining in volume and stress, with baleful strings, to an ethereal prairie hooting, first the chorus, with Tabish eventually following suit, ending in a mild cacophony.  I like the “Western” material better than in bands of similar ilk (Calexico, for example), and the songs are short and to the point.  Moreover, the turn to psychedelia, if trendy, is executed with admirable skill, as are the forays into indie rock.        A-

Sample song  “Lost Day”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSUwqTlju18

ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER, Sideways to New Italy (Ivy League Records/Sub Pop Records)—I have my doubts as to whether “dolewave,” a catchall term used to describe any number of Australian indie performers, particularly from Melbourne, has any utility as a categorical rubric, but Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever (often abbreviated as Rolling Blackouts C.F.) is sometimes grouped among these jangly guitar rock acts.  Sideways to New Italy, the band’s sophomore full-length album, is not especially penetrating and will not blow away the listener.  Rather, the vibe is easygoing, notwithstanding the chugging rhythms and elevated volume that are the record’s default mode, and the ethos is Down Under sunny, even when the imagery calls forth wind, chill, or rain or the mood turns toward introspection.  On occasion, particularly on “Falling Thunder” and to a lesser extent on “Cameo,” the band’s tonal palette summons to mind a band from the other side of the continent, Pond (see the 2015, 2017, and 2019 music surveys), minus the psychedelia.  Like Pond, Rolling Blackouts C.F. has imbibed from the Todd Rundgren well of inspiration, conjuring a warmly fluid and heart-tugging chorus out of a dry-as-dust verse in “Falling Thunder.”  “Cars in Space” is certainly kinetic and bright, and it is a pleasure to hear four guitars (two electric, one acoustic, one bass) churning in tight ensemble, but, in spite of the veiled references to aboriginal culture (“Could have been stumbling/on the ancient stone”), it is hard to say just what this song means.  Tom Russo’s voice is capable but not all that expressive, rendering affectless whatever the band intended to convey.  One of the rare songs to slow things down, “Sunglasses at the Wedding” is gently strummed, with minimal percussion, and reflective, reminiscent of Adam Granduciel and the War on Drugs, though Russo’s Dylanesque delivery is less appealing than Granduciel’s on Lost in the Dream (see the 2014 music survey).  The album concludes with “The Cool Change,” a midtempo number with more grit to its vocal than the earlier entries, which in this context is a good thing, and a lyric whose message is for once readily grasped:  the clever, cutting line “This town was not big enough/For the one of you” encapsulates the tale of someone whose ambitions to break out of obscurity crash and burn and who finds himself back home, pretensions crushed by reality.  Like the sung verses elsewhere on the disc, the compositions throughout tend to amble rather than drive toward something emotionally rewarding, with no surprises or subversive twists, either.  I do not dislike the energetic and complaisant guitar-driven music on Sideways to New Italy, but it leaves such a shallow imprint that it is hard to remember how tunes go within minutes of hearing them.    B+/B

Sample song  “Cars in Space”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G93J8FKmrn0

SONGHOY BLUES, Optimisme (Fat Possum Records)—Since Songhoy Blues hails from Mali and is (lazily) grouped by critics under the “desert blues” rubric, the natural point of reference would seem to be Tinariwen (see the 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2014 music surveys), a “desert blues” outfit with which quite a few Americans are familiar.  But the comparison is of limited usefulness:  apart from being Malian bands that syncretize local musical traditions with Western guitar-driven rock, and their personal histories of having been driven from northern Mali by violent Islamic extremists, the two are not all that similar.  Tinariwen’s sound is more languid, ethereal, majestic.  Songhoy Blues is generally faster, louder, punchier, although the music of Tinariwen is more indelible, ultimately.  Even in linguistic terms, Tinariwen are Tuaregs singing in the Tuareg language, Tamashek.  Songhoy Blues sings mainly in Songhai, with smatterings of French and English and one song, the final number, “Kouma,” in Bambara, the Malian lingua franca.  (There are no printed lyrics or translations on offer, but there is an insert explaining the concepts the band is singing about for each song.)  The more direct lineage is from the late Malian legend and bluesman Ali Farka Touré; Songhoy guitarist Garba Touré is the son of his drummer.  The band made Optimisme in Brooklyn with producer Matt Sweeney, who reportedly gave its members a free hand to do as they wished.  By a good measure, the hardest-rocking song on it is the first, “Badala” (We Don’t Give a [Hoot]).  Interesting that the most driving, pulse-racing number is one of the those concerning itself with women’s liberation (this is an all-male foursome); that theme is returned to in the gritty, obsessively churning “Gabi” (Forced) a song critical of the practice of forced marriages.  As in much of West African music, the groove is paramount; this can make the songs sound unvarying to Western ears accustomed to conventions of exposition and development.  “Assadja” (Warrior), “Fey Fey” (Division), “Gabi,” and “Dournia” (Life) all partake of a certain merengue-like, frenetic jitterniness that is accentuated by the relentless emphasis on the rhythmic/harmonic motif that powers the groove.  But in “Badala,” whose guitar riff comes at you like ZZ Top’s “Tush” (1975), it is so thunderously engaging that it matters little.  No other song comes close to being as hardcore, although “Barre” (Change), gentler and pleasingly melodic, still rocks with an edge of steel (strings).  The second half of the album is, for the most part, more subdued.  The softer and tenderer songs at the center of the tracklist, “Pour Toi” (For You) and “Bon Bon” (Candy), both at least partly in French, are less successful because of a drop in the level of the exuberance that is, along with its geniality, this record’s chief selling point.  “Pour Toi” is unusual in that it has a radical change in tempo and tone halfway through, transitioning from lilting to jaunty.  The English-language “Worry,” which follows “Bon Bon,” is not a Bobby McFerrin cover but might as well be; it is equally bland in both its messaging and its music, apart from the characteristically West African reiterative harmonic chord progression.  The poignancy of the melody laid out in “Korfo” (Chains), a song about slavery and its aftereffects, makes the tune.  The album ends quietly with the acoustic “Kouma” (Speech), which is remarkably benign, considering that it is said by the artists to take a jaundiced view of politicians’ pronouncements, and which is, finally, the most Tinariwen-like selection of all.    A-

Sample song  “Barre”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tbSCwXlI8o

SYLVAN ESSO, Free Love (Loma Vista Recordings)—The first, self-titled Sylvan Esso record (see the 2014 music survey) was quirky.  The second (see the 2017 music survey) sanded away some of rough edges of distinctiveness in favor of broader accessibility.  Free Love, the third album from the husband-and-wife pair, Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath, is poppier still.  It is also so short, clocking in at barely twenty-nine minutes, that it almost does not merit being called a full-length record; some EPs are only a few minutes shorter.  If brevity is the soul of wit, then Sylvan Esso has made a fairly witty recording.  Meath’s singing and lyrics still draw from her experience, now nearly a decade gone, as a member of an all-female Appalachian folk group from North Carolina called Mountain Man.  There are images that she conveys in sepia tones, like something discovered in some dusty Smithsonian display case, except that the music is too effervescent and exuberant to leave much room for somber recollection, of girlhood memories, of early romances, of lemonade and pastry served on the porch on a hot summer day.  Her voice is buzzy and breathy, pleasant if often less than full bodied, and this is most plain in settings where there is little instrumentation surrounding her, as in the first and last songs, “What If” and “Make It Easy,” with Sanborn’s electric keyboards growing in volume and density toward the end of each but still not displacing the singer’s primacy.  “Free,” the record’s fulcrum, a storytelling contemplation of the illusions that attach to projecting love toward those around us and seeing it reflected, is treated similarly but with strumming replacing the keys.  As was the case with What Now from 2017, certain of Sanborn’s arrangements conjure a very different band, LCD Soundsystem, in zinging suddenly from quietude to big, bouncy, often syncopated beats, viz. “Ferris Wheel,” “Run Away,” or “Numb.”  “Train” keeps the volume up throughout and adds handclaps and some processed vocals (Sanborn’s?) to supplement Meath’s.  “Numb” goes from a “Girl from Ipanema”–ish verse section (if less dreamy and more matter of fact) to a swingy chorus with a chattering keyboard and throbbing bass for emphasis.  Oddly, “Rooftop Dancing,” another of the quieter songs, streaked with nostalgia and vignettes of magical flight, also fits the “Girl from Ipanema” verse template, suggesting that the band might benefit from bringing in outside songwriting contributors.  Even so, and even as a “fun-sized” sampler, a good deal of thought and feeling went into the production of Free Love, a comfortable marriage of the earthy and homespun with rubbery synthpop dance beats, giving it a fundamental integrity.    A-

Sample song  “Ferris Wheel”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eruW1KHcxc

 

TAME IMPALA, The Slow Rush (Interscope Records/ Universal Music Australia)—Like a fine pair of platform heels, The Slow Rush is Tame Impala’s sexiest record yet.  Moving away (if not a complete break) from the neo-psychedelia of previous discs by Kevin Parker, and toward glam rock and swingy, seventies-era disco, it is the “Don’t Bring Me Down” (Electric Light Orchestra, 1979) of albums.  Even so, the slower, more lachrymose numbers threaten to weigh it down.  It is particularly in these that Parker’s near omnipresent falsetto begins to wear on the listener; at least in the brasher, more glittery songs, his voice is caught up in an ensemble swirl of sound.  That there is a decided 1979 time warp to The Slow Rush—more than once, I discerned the throbbing keyboard pulse of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” in the compositions—does not take away from the album’s originality.  Parker does all the composition, instrumentation, and production himself, having divided his time between facilities in Southern California and his home studio in Fremantle, Australia.  The first half of the twelve-song disc alternates neatly between faster- and slower-paced numbers; the second half is more irregular.  In the second quarter of the tracklist especially, Parker plays around with abrupt shifts in tenor, rhythm, and style midstream, as if adjusting a radio dial, much as Blood Orange (Devonté Hynes) frequently does on his records.  The livelier songs are burnished to a warm glow, with more clarity and tunefulness than we are accustomed to hearing from Tame Impala.  If this sacrifices the sonic experimentalism that made Lonerism (see the 2012 music survey) gripping, the compensating rewards are substantial.  For a song whose main idea is coming to terms with the passage of the years, “It Might Be Time” sounds remarkably upbeat, with a bright sheen and that pulsating, Supertramp-ish keyboard ostinato, relaxed syncopations, and false stops.  Its immediate predecessor, “Is It True,” is a dancefloor-ready quick stepper that would make Hot Chip proud—glib, perhaps, but infectious, with a largely instrumental “trio” section toward the end that maintains the beat but shifts the song’s tenor considerably.  The opener, “One More Year,” is another disco-inflected song, dreamy and with a “chorus” of growly vocal distortion (all Parker’s voice); if the concern is starting out a new year with more consciousness of how precious time is, any brow furrowing is swept away by the beat and a great wash of sound.  “Breathe Deeper” has a childlike singsong quality to its main theme, but the subsidiary verses and sophisticated arrangements, together with another limb-shaking beat, take us far from the world of “Frère Jacques.”  “Borderline” (no relation to the 1984 Madonna song of the same name), a more midtempo number, sets up a call-and-response, except that it is Parker’s falsetto on both sides, ending the exchange with “here comes the sun.”  Another midtempo song, “Lost in Yesterday,” reflecting on how nostalgia can distort perceptions of past hardships, ambles along to a rolling gait, with Parker’s airy musings offset by a periodic interjection of a solemn chord sequence à la the lead-in to Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” (1984).  The choicest of the slower tunes sit at the center of the tracklist.  “Tomorrow’s Dust” is plangent but with chameleon chromaticism and a quasi-Brazilian feel to its acoustic string accompaniment and broad-toned synthesizer harmonics.  The tacked-on fragment at the end repeats the underlying piano vamp from “Breathe Deeper” beneath sampled conversation.  “On Track” is a relatively unsentimental ballad, sung mostly in Parker’s conventional register, sweetly melodic without heaping on the sugar.  Certain tracks are a bit much, either too weepy or overly ambitious, or both (“One More Hour”), but Tame Impala shows a deft touch in fashioning pop hooks and cushy orchestrations for the rest.        A-

Sample song  “Is It True”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN8nJFLu1Rk

 

TOBACCO, Hot Wet & Sassy (Ghostly International)—Tom Fec has done other solo work as Tobacco over the past decade, but this is the first time since Maniac Meat (see the 2010 music survey) that I have caught up with him outside his customary outfit, Black Moth Super Rainbow.  Qualitatively, Hot Wet & Sassy is on a continuum with its predecessor from ten years ago, as Tobacco continues to roll out bizarre, slightly creepy little compositions with repellent titles and vocals so heavily distorted that it is a challenge to make out what is being expressed.  One difference is in Fec’s choice of famous guest vocalist:  in this instance, in place of Beck, it is Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, for “Babysitter.”  (Tobacco has toured with Nine Inch Nails.)  In a low rumble that would chill the blood of any concerned parent, Reznor intones, “I’m the new babysitter … and I can make time slow down.”  Spluttering electronics, a stark drumbeat, and a manic falsetto chorus add to the sense of menace, yet the tune then diverts into a dreamier outro that subverts the mood entirely.  “Stabbed by a Knight” employs a similar device, cutting the grimy, buzzsaw guitar and portentous vocal with brief, chiming intervals of benign respite.  More overt chiming animates “Chinese Aquarius,” but the song cuts an incisive groove as well, something one could actually get up and move to, even as the processed vocal swiftly flips between growly, fuzzy, and whisky-smooth.  The album opens with a zippy, motoric number, “Centaur Skin,” that is about as bright and coloristically saturated as Fec ever gets.  “Headless to Headless” is more “classic” Tobacco, if such an obscure artist warrants that characterization, in its drowsy tempo, ample room around the dour phrasing, and lysergic note bending:  a world viewed through a haze of hookah smoke expelled by the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.  So, in its twisted way, is “Body Double,” through its tenor-pitched electric drilling interjections, its weirdly inappropriate handclaps, its murky singing rising to a furiously smudgy climax, punctuated by various voices commanding, “Turn that sh*t off!”  Two consecutive instrumentals positioned about two-thirds of the way through the tracklist are less grimy and more melodic than we are accustomed to from Tobacco:  “Road Warrior Princess” is dreamily consonant, with a rubbery beat and distortions kept to a minimum; “Poisonous Horses” is more static, existing outside any fixed rhythm, with an angelic choir rising above a stratocumulus layer of fuzz and warped long tones that are surprisingly poignant.  In fact, the most unexpected turn on Hot Wet & Sassy is one toward (im)pure pop confectionery, in songs like “Centaur Skin,” “Chinese Aquarius,” the singsong “Ass-to-Truth,” the gravelly yet ethereal “Jinmenken,” and “Mythemim,” which is like a demented rendition of the hit Isaac Hayes wrote for Dionne Warwick, “Déjà Vu” (1979).  In one of his rare interviews, Fec admitted on Bandcamp that he wanted to see what would happen if he resisted his impulse to dissect compositions and simply let them flow, in the manner of Cyndi Lauper (with perhaps a winking irony).  This funhouse variant on Tin Pan Alley reaches its apotheosis with the trudging final number, “Perfect Shadow,” whose swooping synths at the bridge and chamber music construction (including a turgid keyboard ostinato) aspire to the realm of progressive rock.  Who knows?  Eventually, we might even be hearing versions of Tobacco’s music in elevators and waiting rooms.    A-

Sample song  “Babysitter” (featuring Trent Reznor):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE6vgKrdHzk

 

JESSIE WARE, What’s Your Pleasure? (PMR/Virgin EMI Records)—Although this is an unusually mainstream choice for this music survey, Jessie Ware is hardly a household name; I guarantee that at least some of my sparse readership have no idea who she is.  I have admired her singing since hearing her work with SBTRKT (Aaron Jerome) several years back.  Since then, in addition to her own solo music projects, she has gained exposure, particularly in her native United Kingdom, for creating a food-related podcast with her mother called Table Manners.  Not clear whether the album’s title alludes to a line from Chic’s 1978 dance smash “Good Times,” but nouvelle disco is a primary strand in its weft, most notably in the lead single, “Spotlight.”  Ware worked with Simian Mobile Disco producer/performer James Ford on production, as well as songwriting, on all twelve tracks, plus others such as Joseph Mount of Metronomy, Morgan Geist, Adam Bainbridge, Matthew Tavares, and Benji B.  With these varied hands in the mix and multiple writers on nearly every track, there could easily be a “too many cooks” issue with What’s Your Pleasure?  Instead, the record comes off as slickly produced, even overly polished, glossing over what in too many instances appears hollow at the core.  Ware has said publicly that she wanted more escapist and upbeat fare than offered on her previous two releases, including 2017’s Glasshouse, and this certainly fills the bill.  Lyrics are generally forgettable romantic trifles; compositions borrow shamelessly from well-worn rhythm and blues tropes.  That said, these writers and producers are pros who know their craft.  Moreover, some of the melancholic quality said to have characterized Ware’s prior releases (apart from her debut) leaks through in a few songs here as well (“In Your Eyes,” “The Kill,” to a lesser extent the more vacuous “Save a Kiss” and “Adore You”), giving the album a certain seasoning to take it beyond cotton-candy fluff.  The strongest compositions are the two at the outset, “Spotlight” and the breathy, stretchy, aerobicized title track, and the one at the end, “Remember Where You Are.”  This last owes a great debt to early and mid-seventies pop, particularly R&B (Earth, Wind & Fire) and adult contemporary (the Carpenters, etc.), yet its soft-rock sheen and grand orchestrations are sufficiently warm and glowing to break down any reservations about pastiche.  “Spotlight” offers a Mariah Carey–esque swoony intro (not quite as much melisma) with strings before the dance beat kicks in, which groove might have dispensed with the intro’s emotional vulnerability except that the chorus’s poignant harmony recaptures it.  The most intriguing track, however, is “Mirage (Don’t Stop),” which gathers so many songwriters that it is composition by committee and still manages to be the most experimental on the disc, from its vaguely Brazilian guitar strumming at the outset through its incorporation of elements from Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” (1983) and a lyric half-grafted from Indeep’s “Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life” (1982) to its sampled club sounds atop a propulsive dance beat that takes one back to the Shibuya-kei of Pizzicato Five in its heyday.  What’s Your Pleasure? could have done with more such creative melding; as it is, no amount of funk guitar can really rescue a song like “Read My Lips” from what is essentially boy-band material, and that is the central difficulty I have with the album—at least half of it is too trite and prefab to be worthy of the voice under whose banner it is being issued.    B+/B

Sample song  “Spotlight”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw56LGfrf4A

AFRICAN

SITI MUHARAM, Siti of Unguja: Romance Revolution (On the Corner Records)—This fascinating album is about preserving a legacy, that of Siti (“Lady”) Binti Saad, an early-twentieth-century pioneer in popularizing a genre known as taarab in Zanzibar.  Thought to have originated in Egypt, taarab was brought to the East African coast by the Omani Sultan of Zanzibar and performed as formal court music—until Binti Saad came along and shook things up, switching lyrics from Arabic to the vernacular, Swahili, and “taking it to the streets” by bringing it closer to a related style, kidumbak, more percussive and less string oriented.  In the process, she became a star whose music traveled across the Indian Ocean, where she became Zanzibar’s first recording artist, in a studio in India.  The legacy is carried on by Binti Saad’s great-granddaughter, Siti Muharam, and in the capable hands of musical director Mohamed Issa Matona, a prominent Zanzibari musician, and the producers, Sam Jones and Pete “On the Corner” Buckenham, Siti of Unguja: Romance Revolution is a lively testament rather than a dusty archival project.  Because of the music’s cosmopolitan origins and instrumentation, it would not seem out of place on a soundtrack played as background in any Indian restaurant.  The arrangers added their own flourishes in postproduction in a London facility, such as the bass clarinet of Tamar Osborn, a.k.a. Tamar Collocutor, whose sepulchral, jazzy forays on the untitled seventh track in particular smack of Marty Ehrlich.  Siti Muharam’s pinched, somewhat nasal mewling takes some getting used to since the vocal style is so alien to what we are accustomed to in the West (not so alien to South Asia or the Arab world, however), yet it is a powerful and expressive instrument, lying somewhere between the alto and mezzo ranges.  Matona demonstrates a mellifluous voice in duetting with Muharam on the fourth song, the lilting, Middle Eastern modal “Nyuki,” written by his father, who in turn was a student of Binti Saad; in addition, he plays violin and oud on the record.  The zither-like qanun, whose strings are plucked by Gora Mohamed Gora, supplies a considerable portion of the album’s perceived exoticism and magic.  The first (“Machozi Ya Huba”) and (untitled eighth and) last tracks are purely instrumental.  Otherwise, for those of us who do not understand Swahili, the song meanings are opaque, with the exception of “Kijiti,” which, according to the overwritten and poorly edited yet still informative liner notes, concerns an injustice during the British colonial administration:  a pregnant woman was raped and murdered, but it was the witnesses rather than the alleged perpetrators who were sent to prison.  “Machozi Ya Huba” is darkly cool, with a raga-like figuration in the qanun that is subsequently picked up by the bass clarinet and then the oud.  The final track is much fleeter-footed, with bracing syncopation.  “Sikitiko” is more stately and broadly melodic than anything else on the album; everything that follows is percussion driven and, again except for the somber “Kijiti,” primed for dancing or at least hip swaying.  The most booming percussion pattern powers the fluidly melodic (also modal) “Alaminadura.”  A moving homage to a remarkable woman, Siti of Unguja also opens a window onto an enchanting musical world little known to most Westerners, showing how influences from around the Indian Ocean basin have fed into the music of this centuries-old entrepôt, Zanzibar.    A

Sample song  “Alaminadura” (no videos available for this record):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgwjEvnRctk

JAZZ

NUBYA GARCIA, Source (Concord Jazz)—Fortunately for Nubya Garcia, her first full-length album, which was shortlisted for the Hyundai Mercury Prize and acclaimed in other forums, is more memorable than its pedestrian title.  A Londoner of Trinidadian and Guyanese origin, the tenor saxophonist successfully incorporates strains of several Caribbean genres into her composition.  In fact, the song with the readiest appeal is the lengthy title track, whose “source” is clearly the reggae Garcia grew up with (having cited the Birmingham band Steel Pulse as one of her inspirations).  “Source” is a dreamy excursion, its sax flourishes offset by the reggae rhythms offered up by pianist Joe Armon-Jones and a trio of wordless voices:  Shelia Maurice-Grey (“Ms Maurice”), Cassie Kinoshi, and Richie Seivwright.  The same trio of voices reappears on the much shorter, impressionistic (but still darkly Caribbean) “Stand with Each Other.”  Though Garcia’s attacks, and those of Maurice-Grey on flugelhorn, are impressive on “Before Us: In Demerara & Caura,” it is Armon-Jones’s Latin piano vamps that lift the piece to a higher plane of sophistication and spice.  This is not a knock on Garcia’s compositional skills, which range from solid to inspired, even if her improvisations fall shy in terms of imagination and daring.  But Source’s primary strengths lie in its arrangements.  The opener, “Pace,” is serene, lovely, and expansive, foregrounding the saxophonist’s crystalline tones, though Armon-Jones gets an extensive solo passage as well.  Two songs carry actual lyrics and partner with other artists:  “La Cumbia Me Está Llamando” (Cumbia Is Calling Me) features the lyrics and vocals/Latin percussion of the three-woman group La Perla, with Diana Sanmiguel as lead singer.  Its stark arrangements, heavily percussive with harmonized incantations and call-and-response, evoke Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, the Cuban rumba/guaguancó ensemble (but with a tenor saxophonist in the mix).  “Boundless Beings,” the brief final track, was co-written with Akenya (Seymour), a young Chicago-based singer and jazz pianist.  The most songful composition, it displays a tensile melody with a surprise or two for the ear in the direction it takes; it also shows off Akenya’s jazz chops at the microphone, a deep, rich voice with considerable range and flexibility.  Not much more than a bagatelle, “Boundless Beings” still manages to summon the ethereal at the heart of the genre.  The least impressive track, “The Message Continues” tries a bit too hard to please, verging on smooth-jazz territory, even while never aspiring to venture beyond the land of the lotus-eaters.  Some prettying-up affects “Together Is a Beautiful Place to Be” as well, but its more tightly knit melodic core helps cut through the saccharine.  Even if certain passages are merely marking time, Source truly is something new under the Caribbean (and weak English) sun, setting up anticipation as to where Nubya Garcia might next turn her collaborative spirit.    A/A-

Sample song  “Source” (no videos available for this record that are not condensed versions or remixes):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL4Ae5ORq24

 
 

KRONONAUT, Krononaut (Tak:til/ Glitterbeat)—Not technically spectral jazz in the way the Steve Lehman Octet is (that is, composition driven by mathematical transmutations of sound spectra), arguably not jazz in any sense, Krononaut’s music certainly has a ghostly quality to it, maintaining a state of chilly remoteness even at its noisiest.  Like a cross-pairing of King Crimson and Grachan Moncur III’s glacially slow avant-garde sonic suspension that is the title track of his 1963 album Evolution, the ensemble sits at the boundary between experimental jazz and rock; at its core are guitar, bass, and drums.  Leo Abrahams, the guitarist, who has done session work with Brian Eno and Imogen Heap, among others, leads the band and was the record’s producer.  Martin France sits behind the drum kit.  The majority of the compositions have horns of one sort or another, and generally I like those tracks better.  Even so, the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and Chicago-based alto saxophonist Matana Roberts choose to play largely with a muted or even strangulated tone rather than one that is full-bodied, frequently keeping the focus on what would be regarded as the “rhythm section” in most bands.  While some passages are meterless, certain others only feel that way initially because the beat is so slow or understated.  Krononaut is at its best when it cultivates an aura of otherworldly mystique, as in the opener, “Jena,” or in “Leaving Alhambra” or “Cold Blood”—otherwise, the pieces can sound tentative or as if they lead nowhere.  In “Power Law,” for instance, we get to an uncharacteristic level of churn and intensity but seemingly in service of no particular esthetic aim or realization.  In “Wealth of Nations” and “Examen,” the guitars and bass could be said to serve as a springboard for Roberts’s sax improvisations, but in fact the instrumentalists barely interact; it is as if they exist in separate universes.  The best of the non-horn selections is the rubbery, throbbing “Mob Kindu,” which plays around with rhythms and, like “Leaving Alhambra,” gradually builds to a busy climax.  I wish the liner notes were a little more descriptive:  the opening notes of “Leaving Alhambra” certainly sound as if played on a flute, yet no flute is credited and it is likely Henriksen using a mute that allows him to simulate a woodwind tone.  Toward the end of the mournful, airy “Vision of the Cross,” there is a voice (for the only time on the disc), a breathy falsetto worthy of Sigur Rós’s Jónsi, but this goes uncredited entirely.  An album sometimes more interesting in concept than in execution, yet with more than flashes of inspiration, it must be recalled that this is a (full-length) debut, and Abrahams and the others could take it anywhere from here.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Leaving Alhambra” (no videos available for this record):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkeLVtFy1Bg