MUSIC 2021: A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield
December 30, 2022
GENERAL COMMENTS
It is a perennial problem for me that numerous albums are now being released as either digital-only or as digital plus LP. While I do have a good turntable, I also have a tiny apartment and no desire to accumulate more LPs, as I tried to explain in December to the indifferent store clerk at Rough Trade, most of whose now-tiny floor space at its Rockefeller Center location is devoted to LPs. This ruled out a number of possibilities for the survey, including Jónsi’s Obsidian, L’Rain’s Fatigue, Sofia Kourtesis’s EP Fresia Magdalena, Alea’s Alborotá, and the new Flight Facilities recording, the first from that Aussie duo in seven years.
The pandemic proved endlessly frustrating throughout Plague Year Number Two, 2021. Every time it looked as if we were about to move out of the shadow of Covid-19, another wave of infection arose, along with the usual finger-pointing, vaccine denialism, etc. As in 2020, I only saw one musical performance of note, in early September, a period when the virus was in a period of community remission. At that stage, the Beacon Theatre in my own Upper West Side neighborhood was rightfully emphasizing vaccination rather than face masks, and we went to see King Crimson in concert, performing mainly material from the group’s first iteration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even though the only continuing members from those years are bandleader Robert Fripp (who sat on a stool throughout) and wind player Mel Collins. It was well worth the price of admission.
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King Crimson preparing for Beacon Theatre appearances; photo courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan.
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Notable passings in the world of music in 2021: Stephen Sondheim, Mary Wilson, Chick Corea, Phil Spector, Charlie Watts, Michael Nesmith, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Christa Ludwig, Indian classical vocalist Rajan Mishra, James Levine, Frederic Rzewski, Carlisle Floyd, Edita Gruberová, Bernard Haitink, Chico O’Farrill, Louis Andriessen, Mikis Theodorakis, Bunny Wailer, George Wein, the rapper DMX, Biz Markie, Don Everly, Sarah Dash of Labelle, Pee Wee Ellis, Commander Cody, organist “Dr.” Lonnie Smith, Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers, Sylvain Sylvain, Jimmie Rodgers, R&B singer James Purify, jazz percussionist Milford Graves, salsero Johnny Pacheco, songwriter Jim Steinman, Leslie McKeown of the Bay City Rollers, Pervis Staples, jazz trombonist Curtis Fuller, Jacob Desvarieux of Kassav’, both Astro (Terence Wilson) and Brian Travers of UB40, stage actress/singer Micki Grant, Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains, film composer Leslie Bricusse, jazz guitarist Pat Martino, Ronnie Wilson of the Gap Band, Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, jazz pianist Dave Frishberg, jazz trombonist Slide Hampton, reggae bassist Robbie Shakespeare, Wanda Young of the Marvelettes, baritone Carlos Marín of Il Divo. Phil Schaap, who was at Columbia University a decade before me and was a force in introducing jazz acts on Columbia’s student radio station, WKCR, for years, passed on. Last but not least, Johnny Ventura died, the salsa and merengue bandleader and onetime mayor of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. I once shook hands with him after being introduced by the manager of the all-female merengue outfit Las Chicas del Can in the lobby of the Travel Inn on West 42nd Street.
My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2021, to my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Ariel, for their support, and to my partner, Melissa, for putting up with me working late into evenings toward the end of December 2022 to get this done.
This year, I had a little more material to draw from in selecting my best pop and rock records. Top honors go to the Turkish-Dutch outfit Altın Gün for its glammed-up reimaging of traditional Anatolian tunes, a cross-cultural fertilization that continually delights. Coincidentally, this is the second year in the past three that a Turkish-born singer named Merve provided the lead vocals for the winning act: Merve Daşdemir this year; Merve Erdem two years back. Alas for Erdem, her band, Kit Sebastian, did not fare nearly as well this time around.
My list of the Top Twelve (of the pops) for the year follows:
1. Altın Gün, Yol
2. Public Service Broadcasting, Bright Magic
3. Limiñanas/Garnier, De Película
4. Low, Hey What
5. Turnstile, Glow On
6. Ross from Friends, Tread
7. Marta del Grandi, Until We Fossilize
8. Koreless, Agor
9. Parquet Courts, Sympathy for Life
10. Helado Negro, Far In
11. Kedr Livanskiy, Liminal Soul
12. A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Invisible Cities/Le Cittá Invisibili
ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR
ALTIN GÜN, Yol (ATO Records)—Traditional Anatolian music souped up with modern electronics to add a gloss of Euro-disco and psychedelia: what could be more delightful? According to the band’s own bassist, Jasper Verhulst, Altın Gün (Turkish for “Golden Day”) “sounds like a Turkish kindergarten teacher from the 1980s using an
808! [a Roland drum machine from the early eighties]” One English and three Dutch musicians based in Amsterdam, on drums, drum programming, guitar, and synthesizer, back two Turkish singers, one of whom, Erdinç Ecevit Yıldız, is a Netherlands native. The other, Merve Daşdemir, emigrated from Istanbul. When the website PremierGuitar asked Ben Rider, the English guitarist, about the use of odd meters and polyrhythms on a previous record, he claimed, with no small measure of false modesty, “we have no idea what we’re doing.” In fact, Verhulst and drummer Gino Groeneveld have made forays into studying Turkish music, both the pop psychedelia of the 1970s and more traditional material, and they have Yıldız and Daşdemir to check them in case their instincts lead them astray. All of the music on
Yol (“Route” or “Road”) derives from traditional Turkish music, much of it folk tunes too ancient to have any attribution. The other tracks are credited to twentieth-century musicians, the blind
ashik (bard/musician) Aşık Veysel, a master of the
bağlama (a long-necked lute), and two practitioners of the Anatolian Abdal tradition (which the
Daily Sabah laments is dying out, threatened by the very technology used by bands such as Altın Gün), Çekiç Ali and Neşet Ertaş. (Ertaş died a decade ago; the other two passed away in 1973.) The exception is “Kesik Çayır” (Mown Meadow) written by the band members using lyrics from Ertaş. It is a credit to the band and its concept that the moody “Kesik Çayır,” beginning with percussion and jungle sounds and ending with a Giorgio Moroder, Italo-disco–style motoric echoey pattern, is seamlessly integrated into the mix. The winningest tune is Ali’s “Yüce Dağ Başında” (On the Peak of the Great Mountain), sung by Daşdemir in her husky, textured voice to a glittery dancefloor setting flavored with bass undertones of reggae—truly an earworm. It finds its equal in “Ordunun Dereleri” (Rivers of Ordu), a suavely smoldering midtempo number both wrenchingly romantic and full of portent, one of five offerings sung by Yıldız (Daşdemir is featured in the other seven). Yıldız’s torchy crooning is very much in line with that of any number of Israeli pop stars I have heard, though because Israel is a relatively new country, it might be more accurate to say that its singers are aping Turkish and Arabic vocal stylings. Ertaş’s “Bulunur Mu” (Is It Available) starts out peppy, with a scintillating sheen, but the chorus is a series of descending lines in one of the classic Turkish modes; Daşdemir’s voice lacks the mystique of Yıldız’s, yet she switches effortlessly between modes. “Hey Nari,” said by Bandcamp to have been composed by Ali Ekber Çiçek, although the band gives no credit, is pleading in the rendition by Yıldız, with plenty of jangly
bağlama accompaniment, sounding somewhat akin to Greek
rembetiko classics. If
Yol has any slight drawback, it is that momentum flags a bit on “Side 2” of the record. “Arda Boyları” (translating to something like “Stretches of the River Arda”) is beatless, all angelic sustained tones, with percussion just as filigree. This song and the two that follow, “Kara Toprak” (Black Soil) and “Sevda Olmasaydı” (Even Though It Wasn’t Love), all make use of the
Omnichord, an electronic gadget developed by Suzuki in the early eighties to generate harplike chords. Veysel’s one representation on the disc, “Kara Toprak” is a remorseful reassessment of what truly matters, given a funky guitar intro that seems incompatible with the body of the song yet is its most memorable feature. (This guitar funkiness reappears in “Maçka Yolları,” or “The Roads of Maçka,” a more uptempo piece.) The
baglama-heavy “Sevda Olmasaydı,” by Ertaş, gets the most psychedelic treatment on the record, with a haunted-house feel to the Omnichord’s overtones. Bandcamp noted an airy, quasi-Brazilian sensibility to “Yekte” (no clear translation available), near the end of the record. The album concludes with a simple folk tune, “Esmerim Güzelim” (Beautiful Brunette), sung by Daşdemir, slow-paced and relatively unadorned in the band’s reconception; it really could be something a Turkish kindergarten class is taught to sing.
Yol, far from being musical tourism, is dynamic, inventive, and loads of fun, a treat from the best “multi-culti” band to come out of Amsterdam since Zuco 103 a couple of decades back.
A Sample song “Yüce Dağ Başında”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhDfOYn0118
And the rest . . .
BACHELOR, Doomin’ Sun (Polyvinyl Record Company)—Is
Doomin’ Sun a worthwhile listening experience? I am of two minds on this. Two minds are in fact what went into the making of this project: Ellen Kempner, who normally fronts the band Palehound, and Melina Duterte, who performs (with backing musicians at times) as Jay Som. Seems a little odd for two gay women to dub their collaboration Bachelor, but what the heck. There is enough musicality to prompt a double take in respect of the record’s harmonic intricacies, yet a number of the songs left me with no better than a lukewarm response. Jay Som specializes in “bedroom pop”—the lo-fi, do-it-yourself approach to recording—but the quieter songs here are often the weaker ones, even though Duterte’s soft voice is sweet and supple enough to carry them. Part of the problem is that her counterpart’s voice is not, and it is Kempner’s vocal flaws that really mar the final few tracks. Doubtless Kempner wants to sound raw on “Sick of Spiraling,” but her wavering pitch and willingness to substitute mere inflection for actual singing (forming tones and phrasing), combined with an insipid chorus that any ten-year-old might have dashed off, spikes the effect of the bluesy, plangent electric guitar accompaniment. Similar faults sink the slow, quavery “Aurora,” whose sole glimmer of promise is a certain sophistication in its chord changes, and the pensive, folky title track (though this one is a duet with Duterte) that wraps up the album. The sere, mournful string overtones, provided by Duterte’s real-life partner, Annie Truscott, toward the end of “Doomin’ Sun” are the song’s best feature. The silvered, top-register vocal tones of “Went Out without You” fare better, nicely matching the dreamy, haunting ethos the simple arrangements conjure; this tune’s chief drawback is a dopey lyric. Lyric choices confound even in one of the strongest offerings, “Stay in the Car.” There just is not much emotional payoff from a chorus as prosaic as “She said, ‘Stay in the car and I’ll grab what you want.’” As a Raymond Carver slice of real dialogue, it works fine; as the fulcrum of a song, the one bit repeated multiple times, uh-uh. That said, “Stay in the Car” is rousing, its guitars wailing away in the refrain as a counterpoint to the gentler and more lyrical verse section. The other song that genuinely rocks—and this one actually possesses a thoughtful, evocative verse—is the album’s opener, “Back of My Hand,” its playfully bouncy, dotted-note rhythms in the lead-in blossoming into a radiantly rhapsodic chorus, easily the warmest song on the tracklist. “Spin Out” carries a nicely psychedelic orchestration, redolent of Pond’s “Man It Feels Like Space Again” (see the 2015 music survey), but its dreaminess is ultimately too languidly inert. “Anything at All” sets up a striking contrast between its singsong chorus and the heavy accents of its beat and blaring instrumental enhancements. “Sand Angel” sets up the furtive, shadowy, daydreaming atmosphere of a Juana Molina tune but is too wispy to sustain it even over the course of barely two minutes. I do not know whether Bachelor will turn out to be a onetime alliance between musicians accustomed to being out on their own or a more stable configuration. Either way,
Doomin’ Sun’s blemishes are hard to overlook, even amid the more enjoyable tunes and auspicious settings/passages, and the listener might be better off with Jay Som’s solo work.
B+
CIRCUIT DES YEUX, -io (Matador Records)—Chicago-based Haley Fohr, now in her early thirties, has been releasing records under multiple guises for more than a decade; Circuit des Yeux is her principal project. Grandiose as it is,
-io, her seventh album release in all performing incarnations, exerts a certain fascination. After all, in the annals of artistic misadventure, it is always more interesting to witness a performer overreaching than one phoning it in. The problem I hear with this album is that it practically screams its own artsiness rather than letting the music work its magic organically. Fohr’s having received a Rauschenberg Residency award to spend some time on the late artist Robert Rauschenberg’s estate in Captiva, Florida, did nothing to keep her ambitions grounded; the liner notes coyly mention that some of the material on
-io was written during that time without specifying. The record starts off well enough before getting seriously bogged down in the second half (alas, the longer half) of the tracklist. A quick instrumental lead-in at the outset, “Tonglen/In Vain,” brings us to the centerpiece, the slinky and kinetic “Vanishing.” With its vocal drama kept firmly leashed and its Electric Light Orchestra–type strings tumbling agilely down the scale, “Vanishing” is a concentrated starburst of energy that shows what Fohr can do when self-contained. The follow-up tune, “Dogma,” is a straightforward midtempo number for guitar, percussion, and voice whose direness comes from its repeated minor-mode declinations; again, the song succeeds because it stays in its lane. “Sculpting the Exodus” is a pretentious title, yet the song brings forth considerable power even as it warns of the melodrama to come. Driven by a cycling synth ostinato from Fohr’s collaborator Cooper Crain and accented by a hooting chorus, “Sculpting the Exodus” briefly slows to undulating long tones in the strings before recovering its rhythm; as Fohr intones portentously, “The signal goes on repeating,” the other instruments pile on around her, building the intensity to its swelling conclusion. Beyond this point,
-io takes a serious wrong turn to wallow in slow-motion muckiness. Because the composition on “Walking toward Winter,” “Argument,” and most of all “Neutron Star” is such an appallingly turgid suspension of strings-and-synths-and-horns treacle, the listener’s focus naturally turns to Fohr’s near operatic quality voice, which is indeed a marvelously versatile instrument, however deployed. Its flamboyant excesses notwithstanding, she demonstrates that she is unafraid to wield it in ways that are far from conventionally pretty, particularly in “Stranger”: It is easy to mock the ponderousness freighting the lyric “What a woman I passed on 21st Street,” but for all the vainglory of the same-sex fantasies swirling round this chance encounter, Fohr engages in some impressive vocal pyrotechnics (set against only piano and double bass), breaking into a high register unheard anywhere else on the record (her natural voice is somewhat husky) at one point and sending out a tympanum-straining George of the Jungle cry soon after. It is a minor measure of relief that
-io recovers somewhat in its finale, “Oracle Song,” a lilting lullaby of a piece, its dreamy strings and guitar once more evocative of late-career E.L.O. But apart from “Vanishing,” there is just not much to recommend here.
B/B- Sample song “Vanishing”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ycrnSfGvA
DARKSIDE, Spiral (Matador Records)—While Spiral had enough going on aurally to merit investigation, I came away with a sense that Nicolás Jaar’s solo work is more worthwhile. That is not intended as a knock on Jaar’s partner in Darkside (and former classmate at Brown University), Dave Harrington, a talented instrumentalist who mainly plays various guitars on this record in addition to co-writing and co-producing the songs. Rather, the problem is that, in going from abstract electronica to something of a hybrid with conventional rock, the purity of asceticism is lost and the palette is muddied. Spiral is the sophomore effort from the duo, but the first venture, which I have not heard, debuted back in 2013, an indication of how busy both men have been with other projects. Jaar is not anyone’s idea of an accomplished vocalist, yet he sings on every track, to best effect in “Lawmaker,” in which, not incidentally, he stays in the lower register, where he is more comfortable, throughout. The song rocks in a sinuous way; if a little repetitious, it is freighted with intrigue: who is this cultlike figure “wearing a doctor’s coat” but bearing a lawmaker’s ring, and is he performing a Jim Jones/Peoples Temple act of mass suicide? Some of the lyrics are embroidered by a synthetic “heavenly chorus” of the sort heard on Genesis’s “Enchanted,” from A Trick of the Tail (1976). Nothing else on the record comes close; “The Limit” places a distant second, with its tightly cycling, auto-call-and-response falsetto vocal dispensing sober advice, devolving into a mumbled cacophony at the close. “Inside Is Out There” has the virtue of minimal singing/chanting, but its metronomic swift gait is an elegant rhythmic lattice framing a lot of lovely empty calories over the course of eight and a half minutes. “Liberty Bell” has a weirdly Western, cowboy riding high in the saddle feel to it and was an opportunity for Jaar, whose father is of Palestinian origin, to sample the church bells of the mostly Christian town of Beit Sahour, a suburb of Bethlehem in the West Bank. The outstanding trait of “The Question Is to See It All” is clinking percussion like Jacob Marley’s ghost shuffling his chains in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; otherwise, the piece is sunk by a tuneless and insipid chorus. The blankly epistolary, ruminative title track features a great deal of quiet acoustic strumming from Harrington; he is also credited with playing trumpet and trombone, yet these are hard to discern in the mix. At its best, the finale, “Only Young,” with its churchly organ tones, summons up memories of Procol Harum; alas, another limp refrain dissipates any vibrancy or nostalgic fellow feeling. Befitting the group’s name, many of the compositions affect a somber mien, but it often feels unearned simply because they are not emotionally engaging enough. Darkside has not yet figured out what it wants to be; perhaps it needs a more skilled tunesmith or at least a more charismatic singer to complement Jaar’s and Harrington’s mastery of electronic arrangements. In the meantime, its presentation falls flat. B
DRY CLEANING, New Long Leg (4AD)—If you have ever wondered, Why are there very few albums that come across like spoken word with musical accompaniment? then
New Long Leg is for you. Like the Fall before it, South London’s Dry Cleaning puts forward a vocalist, Florence Shaw, who eschews singing, resulting in a record that eschews melody altogether, almost. This is a style but not one that I favor. Even Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits made some attempts at singing, after all. Apart from the lugubrious “More Big Birds,” in which Shaw sketches out a tepid and uninteresting melodic embellishment, not even a full-fledged tune, there is just a bit of humming on the title track and nothing more than routine inflections elsewhere. The sad part is that, whether or not she is a capable singer (she handles her part on “More Big Birds” well enough), Shaw has an engaging voice, one to which the listener will readily lend an ear. Moreover, whereas I frequently carp about the quality of lyrics in the course of this blog, Shaw’s here are one of the band’s big selling points, clever and creative. She employs a Joycean stream of consciousness in her patter, at times confessional, at other times concocting fractured segments of inane bourgeois dialogue, suggestive of the comic strip Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies (“guarantee: all dialogue overheard”) that used to run regularly in the
Village Voice. The moody “A. L. C” starts off with her protest, “You can’t just come into my garden/in your football kit and start asking/questions about who lives here/Who’s asking?” Beyond Shaw’s wordsmithing skills,
New Long Leg rises or falls on its accompanying guitarwork. Tom Dowse, the lead guitarist, and Lewis Maynard, the bass player, are well schooled in the traditions of English postpunk, stretching back to bands such as Gang of Four, Magazine, Public Image Ltd, or Echo & the Bunnymen. When their interactions with each other and with drummer Nick Buxton are dynamic, the band’s sound is fresh and worth a listen, even if the home audience must supply its own mental melody to fill in the blanks. The guitar interplay comes off best on the first two tracks, the brisk, frenetic “Scratchcard Lanyard” with its thrumming bass line and the slower, syncopated, keening strings and prickly glissandi of “Unsmart Lady,” leaving the remainder of the record as something of a letdown, even if some of the magic is recaptured in “Her Hippo”—its downcast, glowering guitar patterns eventually whipped into a higher-pitched, whiny froth, accented toward the end with a rare bit of piano—and “New Long Leg,” whose shifting, cycling harmonics are like a conventional verse-chorus song structure with the treble turned down to inaudible. “John Wick” likewise has a tangible shift in its guitar ruminations from “verse” to “chorus.” The final and longest track, “Everyday Carry,” mostly marks time but features a two-and-a-half-minute bridge in which looping produces persistent eructations of groaning guitar from a swamp of shimmer, to an extent that grated on the nerves of my customarily tolerant partner. There is a considerable cool factor attending to Dry Cleaning’s debut album, and deservedly so, but I have never been a proponent of minimalism, and the band’s antimelodic stance leaves me feeling cheated of what might have been.
B+
MARTA DEL GRANDI, Until We Fossilize (Fire Records)—Too
wispy to be truly a great record, Marta Del Grandi’s debut nonetheless
charms thanks to its lithe and elegant songwriting. It is tempting to
think of these eight arty songs as miniatures, but they really are
nothing of the sort, averaging close to four minutes in length.
Until We Fossilize
will not be to everyone’s taste; soft and quiet, with hushed vocals, it
does not rock at all. Del Grandi, an Italian singer and
multi-instrumentalist who trained in jazz vocals at the Giuseppe Verdi
Conservatory in Milan, has a voice that is remarkably similar to that of
Julia Holter (see the 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2018 music surveys), though
with less of a thespian sensibility than either Holter or Kate Bush.
In fact, the album this one to my mind most closely matches in
temperament is Anthony Phillips’s gentle but affecting debut,
The Geese and the Ghost
(1977), minus the courtliness. Because instrumentation is spare, much
of the expressivity rides on Del Grandi’s supple, muted-horn-quality
voice. (The percussion of Shahzad Ismaily, for instance, is so low-key
as to barely register.) Apart from drums, the
kalimba
in “Birdsong,” and a few strings, the singer plays the instruments
(guitar, piano, synthesizers) herself. “Amethyst,” co-written with the
Indian percussionist Tarun Balani, was positioned by the label as lead
single. Appropriately jewel-like, it centers on a chorus made up of the
singer’s multitracked voice, accompanied by plucked chords; it
concludes with a lyrical “trio” section for voice and strings. But
“Swim to Me” is the most plaintive and melodically open offering
(followed closely by “Somebody New”), harmonized by music-box piano
arpeggios, and furnishes the lyric that is the album title. Even though
this and other tunes are taken at slow tempos and at times seem devoid
of rhythm at all, they have a surprising agility and fleetness when
called upon. The short opener, “Taller than His Shadow,” with its
portentous, sustained keyboard chords and eerie overtones, was written
to accompany a film, Elettra Fiumi’s
Radical Landscapes, and
passages in other songs resemble soundtrack work as well. These
intervals hark back to Bush’s “Under Ice,” one of the most cinematic
selections from her 1985 album
Hounds of Love. “Shy Heart” comes
at the listener as a troubadour-ish guitar lay, but the extensions of
its simple melody display considerable compositional sophistication.
Unafraid to experiment, Del Grandi concocts some truly odd vocal
harmonies at the core of the spectral “Lullaby Firefly” and at the
outset of “Birdsong.” The latter is accompanied by the
kalimba of Federica Furlani, its chiming tones sounding spookily like the opening of the theme song of the reboot of
Battlestar Galactica
(2004-2009). The vocals at the beginning are not so much evocative of
birdsong as of a combination of Buddhist chant (Del Grandi has spent
time in Nepal) and a small mammal’s yelp of distress; they later resolve
to something more full-bodied, with a questioning intonation rising
toward the end of each line. The final number, “Totally Fine,” is the
most overtly percussive, with a quasi–Spanish Caribbean rhythm; the
singer keeps repeating “it’s totally fine” in the lilting refrain as if
trying to convince herself without much success. That quavery chorus is
overpowered by a sense of regret and lamentation that pervades the
number. Barely thirty-one minutes in duration,
Until We Fossilize
tantalizes even as it might strike the listener as sketchy or overly
conceptual; a richer exploration of Marta Del Grandi’s art of song
composition and performance awaits.
A- Sample song “Amethyst”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi5hW99dxdI
HELADO NEGRO, Far In (4AD)—At the outset, I must admit to not being a fan of Helado Negro’s hippy-dippy stylings generally. That said,
Far In generated a fair amount of buzz for the artist, whose real name is Roberto Carlos Lange, and I ended up liking some of its tunes more than I expected. There is something to be said for American-born Latino acts such as Helado Negro (in English, “black ice cream”) or Hurray for the Riff Raff (Alynda Mariposa Segarra; see the 2017 music survey) doing their own thing without feeling any compulsion to perform in established genres or conform to stereotypes. As it happens, I saw both artists in a show at Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center a few years back, and I was bemused by Lange’s stage accompaniment, two presumably female (judging only by stature) dancers covered from head (and when I say “head,” I mean from the top of the head, with no obvious opening for eyes or breathing passages) to toe in shiny mylar fabric, shimmying and slinking up and down. Though this record has the consistency of graham crackers moistened in milk (the Spanish descriptor would be
blando, or soft, although I have no doubt Lange would prefer
suave), if you allow yourself to surrender to the groove, it can transport you places. It takes its good ol’ time getting there; with fifteen tracks and a total duration that exceeds 68 minutes, Helado Negro’s latest is the musical equivalent of one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ents, spending an eternity saying not a whole lot. The most ingratiating songs hit the sweet spot, beckoning toward 1970s pop and soft rock while retaining enough of their own identity to avoid pastiche. The prime example is “Gemini and Leo.” Compositionally, its bright exuberance and subtly effective arrangements, including backing vocals from Opal Hoyt, compare nicely to those of M83 (Anthony Gonzalez) at its poppiest, while the easygoing swing and devil-may-care hedonism of the lyrics suit the ambience to a T. “There Must Be a Song Like You” likewise scores with a drowsy sensuality whose laid-back cool, tempered with steel pans, recalls the lounge music of Supreme Beings of Leisure from a couple of decades back. Even more languid, like a distant rumor of the Land of the Lotus Eaters, is “Agosto” (August; one of several Spanish-language numbers), featuring the members of Buscabulla (see the 2020 music survey). Lange’s swoony falsetto (perhaps paying homage to David Gates’s warbly opening phrases of “Make It with You” from 1970), eventually doubled by Raquel Berrios of Buscabulla and elsewhere playing off her bittersweet countermelody, conjures a picnic spread on a sultry day when everyone has indulged just a bit too much. The tracks that are pure groove, “Aureole” and “Outside the Outside,” are a little less soul quenching but still have a rhythmic infectiousness, the former shimmery and pulsating, the latter stretchy and vapid enough to be a gentle parody of a dancefloor tune. For “Wind Conversations,” Helado Negro goes full Cat Stevens, via an exquisitely folky acoustic lay with a mildly growly vocal; this song is of a piece with the rest of the album’s mellow material and yet stands apart from it. “Aguas Frías” (Cold Waters) and “Thank You For Ever” are more in cowboy mode; the slow-paced, dusky “Thank You For Ever” is far more haunting, the maudlin refrain notwithstanding; the twangy “Aguas Frías” is dragged down by its mawkish (Spanish) lyrics, something that mars a number of these selections. “Telescope,” which features Benamin (Benjamin Julia), is replete with greeting-card sentiments, to the point where Benamin’s sourly bleating vocal interjects itself as a needed tonic to spike all that treacle. The record’s sole instrumental, “Brown Fluorescence” does not overstay its welcome, uncharacteristically, but is in its quietly burbling way the most experimental composition on the disc. No masterpiece,
Far In may be swampy and overly sticky, yet it reveals dimensions to Helado Negro’s songwriting that I had not thought him capable of previously.
A-/B+
KEDR LIVANSKIY, Liminal Soul (2MR/Omnian Music Group)—In these troubled days, anything Russian seems out of fashion, and as long as Russia is obliterating large parts of its southern neighbor, there is a natural inclination to shun any cultural export that is not explicitly anti-regime. I have not come across any pronouncement on the war or Vladimir Putin from Yana Kedrina, who performs as Kedr Livanskiy (“Cedar of Lebanon”), and debates could rage endlessly over the fairness of whether artists (such as opera singer Anna Netrebko) whose work is generally apolitical should be held to a standard of moral rectitude that led several members of Pussy Riot to flee Russia recently and one to be detained in Croatia under threat of extradition to Turkmenistan. I will steer clear of that and focus on the electronic “underground” music that brought notice to Kedr Livanskiy.
Liminal Soul is a slight album, less than thirty-four minutes in total duration, and I found it wanting in certain regards. Only a handful of the nine tracks come across as fully fleshed songs, notably “My Invisible,” “Teardrop,” and “Night.” Some of the others are like SoundCloud clips, which is indeed how the artist originally caught the interest of the American label 2MR, little more than motifs or suggestions of a mood and setting. Still, I do not want to sell Kedr Livanskiy short. Singing mainly in her native language (the moony, underdeveloped “Boy” is in English), she has a fine, versatile voice, whose angelic manifestation, perhaps casting back to Russian sacred choral music, is displayed in multitracked, hooting fashion in the very first number, “Celestial Ether,” grounded by a vigorous, syncopated, African-inspired
breakbeat. The last two compositions, “Badlands” and “Storm Dancer,” are atmospheric. The former is cinematic in its sweep, despite lasting barely three minutes, and drama (apart from some weirdly cartoonish vocal overtones), with a certain tension to be resolved between the quasi-heroic, Evanescence-like sung melody and the shimmery synth undulations roiling below. The wordless “Storm Dancer” starkly plays off its vocals, together with a lutelike string instrument and just a touch of horn, against rippling synthesizer eruptions with deep bass undertones. “Teardrop” seems uncertain whether it wants to be a plangent dream pop chamber piece or perky electro-disco; the breeziness of one side of its split personality undermines the emotional drive of the other. The steadier breakbeats and somber pall of “Night,” generated with the assistance of “avant-electronic group” Synecdoche Montauk, bring the song closer to the terrain plowed by Tricky and other
trip-hop artists several decades ago. “Your Turn,” featuring the performer’s producer, Flaty (Evgeniy Fadeev), makes for a nice pendant to “Night”—similar in tempo and temperament, though more unvarying and thus feeling unripened. Kedr Livanskiy achieves the fullest synthesis of her spiritual/dramatic and electro-house ambitions in “My Invisible.” This memorable four-and-a-half-minute pop lozenge manages to be at once fleet-footed and hauntingly goth, ending in an airy, dreamy, high-pitched coda that reiterates the song’s introductory phrases. More a collection of intriguing bagatelles and sound clips than genuine compositions,
Liminal Soul nonetheless furnishes enough grist to whet a listener’s appetite for more.
A-/B+
KIT SEBASTIAN, Melodi (Mr Bongo)—Since this duo won Album of the Year honors in the 2019 version of this survey, expectations were naturally high for their follow-up effort. Too high, it turns out; the sophomore slump has affected Kit Sebastian. It is not too hard to put a finger on what is wrong with
Melodi. Primarily, belying the album’s title, the melodies themselves are the record’s weakest point, pallid and jejune. They simply do not stand up to the richly exotic arrangements that ornament them. Beyond that, Kit Martin, the “boy genius” composer behind the orchestrations and most of the composition, overreached, with his omnivore eclecticism ranging here from Turkish-inspired pop to bossa nova and the cha-cha, the deep grooves and
wah-wah of early seventies blaxploitation soundtracks to the smooth lounge standards of the late sixties and beyond. The peculiar thing is that Martin and singer/lyricist Merve Erdem’s acclaimed debut,
Mantra Moderne, also delved into a wide range of influences beyond the Near Eastern yet was far more successful in seamlessly integrating them. Generally,
Melodi alternates between Turkish-accented songs (sung in Turkish by Erdem, a native speaker) and reflections of other kinds of pop music, done in English. And the Turkish ones tend to be better. The record could be a stew of mediocrity were it not for Martin’s ample compositional and arranging skills; they just do not seem to extend to writing memorable “tunes” here. Certainly, Erdem’s lyrics, particularly those in English, will not win any prizes. And her singing strikes me as being outside of her comfort zone on this disc. I have no idea why this was done. She is too good a vocalist to show signs of strain, but a number of the themes she tackles (or is asked to tackle, depending on how the division of labor goes) put her either too high or too low for her natural range, while some efforts to sound plaintive seem a bit too performative. It is no accident that the best cut on the record is “Ahenk” (Harmony), which essentially has no melodic core at all. Erdem speaks rather than sings her lyric, which purports to examine “the dark side of humanity” according to an interview by
It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, though I cannot begin to fathom the translated line “The concreteness of existence is mimetic to a body without organs.” It is Martin’s vintage strings, dialing up Turkish modes for the accompaniment, that make the piece. In a similar vein, the Anatolian-tinged piano line that introduces “Yeter” (Enough), a song about a poor girl’s struggle for recognition, stays with the listener rather than the pleading refrain. Of the songs in English, “Elegy for Love” rings truest, the sultriness of Erdem’s sighing lyrical delivery and horn charts mixing with a relaxed, blue-mood guitar line more or less overcoming an incongruously upbeat (major-mode) primary theme. “Inertia” is pitched as a throwback to the Burt Bacharach sound, but that has been done better by Pizzicato Five (viz.
Couples from 1987), to say nothing of the
Austin Powers movies; indeed, the song comes across as second-tier Pizzicato Five. “Please Don’t Take This Badly,” the final track, deploys Martin’s acoustic guitar in a Brazilian-pop-beckoning direction, with phrases ending on a cha-cha rhythm, but with a verse and chorus, sung by both band members, that is just embarrassing; the song quickens its pace following a false ending to close things out. The title track is in two parts, the first languid and with just the rudiments of an actual melody but some interesting accidentals on the descending chords; the second part is quicker and more percussive as it slightly expands the theme introduced in part one.
Melodi disappoints, but the pandemic forced strange circumstances on performers and songwriters, and perhaps every group should be allowed at least one mulligan, especially one with as much promise as Kit Sebastian.
B+/B
KORELESS, Agor (Young Turks Recordings)—“Trance” does not quite fit this debut from the electronica artist Koreless (Lewis Roberts, from Bangor, Wales) since none of its ten tracks last more than six minutes, on a record that barely clocks in at thirty-three minutes total. The Glasgow-based producer has issued a handful of singles and a couple of EPs previously and has been active in shaping the sound of performers as diverse as FKA Twigs (on
Magdalene; see the 2019 music survey), Rita Ora, Caribou, Sampha, and David Byrne. His own record has a pop sheen, notwithstanding some dark contrasts, and a bounce to its electronics; nothing labored or more than minimally industrial here. There are female voices sampled on several tracks, none of which are credited in the liner notes; their singing is generally wordless or impossible to decipher, with the exception of “Shellshock,” the album’s most substantive track. Koreless shares a fancy for melodrama with Burial (William Bevan; see the 2007, 2012, and 2013 music surveys) but does not distort voices or employ
dubstep beats in the fashion of Burial. Rather, his music is closer in spirit to the vocal samplings and lambency of Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin; see the 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2018 music surveys) or the hazy serenity of Boards of Canada, but with more of a dance orientation. The odd-numbered tracks are all, with the exception of the relatively spare, Japanese-inspired “Frozen,” under two minutes in duration and fairly inconsequential; in fact, two of them, “Primes” and “Act(s),” could be viewed as pendants to the weightier compositions that preceded them (“Black Rainbow” and “White Picket Fence,” respectively). “Black Rainbow” accents a partly syncopated electronic dance rhythm on tightly clipped repeat with stabbing overtones ending in a “hee hee hee!” like a mechanical chimp on synths and samplers instead of beating a drum. More classically inspired is “White Picket Fence,” which starts out slow, with voice and harpsichord-emulating keyboards, picking up a driving dance beat after the opening measures, then putting that rhythm on pause as the voice cycles through broken chords, with occasional return attacks in the keys, extending to the “coda” of “Act(s).” Doubtless it appealed to Koreless’s sense of humor to label the grimmest-sounding number “Joy Squad”; its dire opening stasis is somewhat alleviated by the introduction of voice and more high-pitched stabbing overtones as the agitated rhythm kicks in. The final song, “Strangers,” takes its leisure; like “Frozen,” it draws from Asian sources and is more songful than anything else on offer, deftly arranging its voices into duets and chorales for a sunny conclusion, if one occasionally occluded by minor chord progressions. The record summits with “Shellshock.” Koreless describes, in a
Dazed interview with Felicity Martin, his creative process as typically starting with a joke, such as “putting together two really stupid ideas,” although it is hard for the listener to interpret the combination of “epic” and “melancholy” that went into “Shellshock” as either dumb or jokey. The song’s frenetic, motoric rhythmic core supports a plangent vocal whose sparse, overdubbed words we can actually understand for once. The vocals are paused midstream, but not the rhythmic churn, before picking up again, and then it all ends becalmed.
Agor, which is Welsh for “open” (and also connotes the
agora, or public square in ancient Greece), is masterfully conceived and executed, but, as with Marta Del Grandi’s
Until We Fossilize (see above), a little more meat on its bones would have made for a more impressive achievement.
A-
LIMIÑANAS/ GARNIER, De Película (Berreto Music/Because Music)—The title
De Película (From Film) leads one to think that this album is soundtrack; it is not, although the Limiñanas have written a couple of soundtracks previously. Rather, it is a cinematic concept record, whose back story is deliberately a bit foggy: Saul is a seventeen-year-old “man” in southern France who becomes entranced when a caravan comes to town, one that includes the lovely Juliette, who is barely older but is already turning tricks to get by. Saul decides to go away with the caravan through the Occitane and Costa Brava, and Juliette initiates him into her world of adventure, dancing into the night, drugs, etc. But before anything more flowery can blossom, she departs abruptly, leaving him to wonder what might have been. Very much the sort of thing you might see in fleshed-out form in an art-house cinema from a 1960s French or Italian film in black and white, where the hyper-romanticism of youthful sexual awakening is laid low by gritty realism in the end. As is typical for a Limiñanas record, there is little actual singing; the story is mostly narrated in Lionel Limiñana’s characteristically gruff voice, with some accent contributions from his wife, Marie, who is also, White Stripes–style, the drummer. What is markedly distinct is the collaboration with electronic dance music/house/techno producer and DJ Laurent Garnier. Garnier’s arrangements, although atmospheric and subtle through a good portion of the production, add several tasty and voluptuous layers to what has always been a rather spare, “garage-y” sound in the Limiñanas’ conception of neo-psychedelia. Garnier did more than produce; he also co-wrote every track with Lionel Limiñana (and a third songwriter on several tracks) and played synthesizers—according to the credits, he even sang at times, though I cannot hear it and am unfamiliar with his voice. A couple of guest vocalists make an appearance: the France-based Chilean singer and actor Edi Pistolas on “Que Calor” (What Heat!) the only Spanish-language track on the disc, and the singer/songwriter/actor Bertrand Belin on the weirdly baroque, piteously lamenting “Au Début, C’était le Début” (In the Beginning, There Was the Beginning). Pistolas, like the Limiñanas, eschews actual singing, though he attacks his lyric with gusto, while Belin is far from appealing in front of a microphone—one might charitably say his voice has “character.” This is a long record, a little more than an hour total, and the eleven tracks can seem fairly repetitive: Garnier, as in his solo work, does not go in much for development, letting the narration drive the song and introducing variations as the mood strikes. This is excusable because the music is engaging even when it is just driving around in circles. Three numbers are purely instrumental and thus have no narrative engine; of these, “Promenade Oblique” is easily the most dynamic, a true pop song without words, drawing power from its mélange of Lionel’s too-cool-for-school guitar riff, Marie’s muscular drumming, the swoony synths of Garnier, and its
Shaft theme (1971)
wah-wah cycling, a blast of classic rock nostalgia that would make the artists’ compatriots in Justice (see the 2007 and 2011 music surveys) proud. The other two instrumentals are content to ride their groove into the sunset, with just the occasional countertheme for contrast. For much of the remainder of the album, Garnier and Lionel’s moody orchestrations set the frame for what is the most Gallic-smoky-cool spoken-word performance (in French,
naturellement) that you are ever likely to hear. For “Tu Tournes en Boucle” (You Run in a Loop), the psychedelic sound becomes grimy and sludgy, with plenty of reverb, and in “Juliette,” likewise, the intensification of the sole harmonic pattern renders the sauce thickier and grainier after a time, not to mention more eerie. In each of these tunes, Marie Limiñana furnishes backing vocals—recognizing that hers is not a strong voice, she sticks with breathy vocalizations, which are Marie at her sexiest. She practically whispers “Je t’aime” repeatedly in “Ne Gâche pas l’Aventure Humaine” (Don’t Squander the Human Adventure), the one composition in which hers is the only voice, set against a rhythmic monotone buzzing like an office phone. This piece, along with “Au Début, C’était le Début,” was co-written with Belin. “Que Calor,” co-written with Henríquez Edouard, is a psyched-out monster mash of big drumbeats and tremulous floating synth vamps in support of Pistolas’s hortatory evocation of the heat and sweat of underground dance clubs, even as he moves the story along. The final song, “Saul S’est Fait Planter,” for which a polite translation might be “Saul Is Spurned,” is a departure in that all the speaking happens at the beginning, to minimal accompaniment, after which a sobering march establishes itself, as the protagonist comes face to face with the hard lessons of coping with a reversal in amorous fortune.
De Película can test the listener’s patience, yet it is well conceived and executed, as the Limiñanas discover a partnership that has allowed them to avoid getting into a rut.
A/A-
Sample song “Que Calor”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hP3O-eVxJE
LOW, Hey What (Sub Pop Records)—Having honed its craft for nearly twenty years now, Low—now down to a husband-and-wife duo since the departure of Steve Garrington as bassist—knows what it wants and produces it with admirable consistency. I say that with the caveat that this is just the second Low album I have reviewed, in a long discography stretching back to 1993. But 2018’s
Double Negative got high marks in that year’s music survey. The hallmarks of that record’s sound carry over into
Hey What without any recycling of material. Under the guiding hand of producer B J Burton, the band revels in the contrast between organic, crystalline melodies, typically with Alan Sparhawk singing lead and Mimi Parker harmonizing, and gritty, distorted instrumental accompaniment. About the worst one can say about the newest release is that a number of songs are given substantial padding at the end, making it at least several minutes longer than necessary. Most arresting is the opener, “White Horses.” Stark and portentous, with just clipped guitar strokes from Sparhawk for accompaniment, still the melody carries a certain sweetness. As the song progresses, it is on the verge of being overwhelmed by white noise but never quite succumbs. Past the 3:30 mark, annoyingly, it decays into just the guitar clips, repeating like a turn signal that some forgetful driver failed to shut off, eventually acquiring overtones that make it more, but only slightly, like the synthesized organ pulses in the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971). These choppy pulsations carry over without pause into the following tune, “I Can Wait.” Also striking is “More,” loud with fuzz-tone guitar, with such stress on the beat that no percussion is needed, but Parker’s multitracked voice (she goes solo here) is equally strong and cuts like glass through the brew of amplification. The first verse of “Days Like These” comes at the listener in the guise of a medieval lay, with lutelike accompaniment, but when it comes back following a brief instrumental interlude, the sung portion is unchanged but the guitar has shifted from pastoral to grungy and strident. This is one of the tunes that essentially completes its business in two minutes, yet still runs for five. “Hey,” another song that puts Parker front and center, likewise gets its singing out of the way early, and more than half of the ballad then floats on a billowy cushion of largely instrumental dream pop, something that one might expect from M83 (Anthony Gonzalez), a somnolent meringue of a fantasia. Another tender little descending-scale melody takes shape with “All Night,” though the lyric’s blankness (“All night, you fought the adversary/It was no ordinary fight”) detracts from its poignancy. “Don’t Walk Away” is anthemic, moving at the slowest pace on the album, as Sparhawk lays out the theme above a nebulous, palpitating backdrop; the piece soon becomes a true duet, serene and euphonious. Parker’s most powerful drumming occurs in the trippy, protracted instrumental section of the final number, “The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off),” which is even more ominous in tone than the opener. A worthy successor to
Double Negative, no doubt,
Hey What is as distinctive as it is recognizably Low, a band that sounds like no other.
A-
PARQUET COURTS, Sympathy for Life (Rough Trade Records)—When the Talking Heads issued
Remain in Light in 1980, it marked a new direction for a band that had cut its teeth on the postpunk/New Wave surge of the late seventies: more dance-oriented, more abstract and looser in structure, full of African-inspired polyrhythms.
Sympathy for Life is Parquet Courts’
Remain in Light, although the parallels are necessarily inexact. Having grown weary of making the same kind of quasi-minimalist, postpunk/garage-inflected music as well as wary of rock-star idolatry by fans, Austin Brown and Andrew Savage decided to make a record that spoke to their love of dance music and New York City clubs. Unlike the Talking Heads disc, the eleven entries here all have discrete song structure, and not all of them are fast paced. But rhythm and groove are the organizing principle throughout. The result just might be the best Parquet Courts album yet, although I am only familiar with
Sunbathing Animal (2014),
Human Performance (see the 2016 music survey), and
Wide Awake! (see the 2018 music survey). Which is not to say flawless by any means. The band is frequently content to let a particular riff take over an entire song, overwhelming a wan, underdeveloped melody, and Brown and Savage, though generally on pitch, are both weak vocalists. The album loses thrust toward the end. Still, the first five songs in particular are ingratiating in a way I had not encountered from this band since the single “Sunbathing Animal.” “Walking at a Downtown Pace” starts things off breezily, with pep in its step while also casting a glance back toward the colorful pop of the first British invasion. “Black Widow Spider” churns propulsively, even as it is one of those aforementioned tunes whose melody could have used a lot more fleshing out. The quasi-Jamaican bass tones and rhythms of “Marathon of Anger” set it apart; the dour tone is leavened by synthesized boop-boops up and down the scale like something from Soft Cell circa 1981. One of the most songful selections, “Just Shadows” is taken at a tight tempo in 3/4 meter. “Plant Life” is a more relaxed, funky, jamlike reverie, with snatches of half-audible dialogue toward its end. Past this point, the record becomes less sure-footed, though “Homo Sapien,” basically an insistently repetitive riff with an outlet into a grimy four- or five-measure chorus, brings back a bit of that Carnaby Street–mod retro spirit. And the title track is another stretchy, funky
Remain in Light–style groove. “Application/Apparatus” is every bit as robotic and mechanical as its clunky title would suggest. “Zoom Out” and “Trullo” bring in ’da funk once more but in service of a pair of lamentably colorless tunes. The final piece, “Pulcinella,” slows things down to a 6/8 beat, with just a light drum and electric guitar accompaniment. Its bluesy reminiscences and introspection seem deeply personal, yet the song’s impact is diluted by the inadequacies of Andrew Savage as a lead singer, unfortunately. When the instruments rally toward the end of the seven-minute composition, the disc’s longest, you have to wonder what has been gained through tenuous delivery of the critical verses.
Sympathy for Life is an easy record to enjoy, but in the process it exposes the limitations of Parquet Courts’ expressivity and songwriting knack.
A-
Sample song “Walking at a Downtown Pace”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R7wpcw1Z4A
POND, 9 (Spinning Top Records)—The one and only time Fremantle, Australia,
hosted the America’s Cup, in 1987, Nick Allbrook, the lead singer of Pond, was
not yet (quite) born. So when he sings about what the city was like “before the
America’s Cup,” it is obviously not from firsthand experience (unless he was
reincarnated and can recall his previous life). “America’s Cup” is a mild lament
over what the band’s hometown, Fremantle, has become since the hoopla
surrounding that short-lived triumph, from rough-and-tumble to gentrification.
The song has a poignancy that is absent from too much of
9, which is the ninth
release from the band (and coincidentally has nine tracks), and although its
melodic range is limited (the verse portion is pretty starkly black and white),
that still gives it more expressivity than most of the songs presented here.
Pond is generally classified as psychedelic rock, or neo-pyschedelia, but those
terms mean little in the context of the new release: “psychedelic” calls forth
the sorts of bright, even garish colors envisioned through an acid trip or
psilocybin, yet
9 is remarkably monochrome, with several exceptions. In fact,
songs like “Human Touch,” “Pink Lunettes,” and “Rambo” are “duotone,” in that
they remain stuck yo-yoing between just two notes throughout, which gets tedious
quickly. The quasi-Brazilian (
cavaquinho-like) guitar accompaniment and sampled
voices in “Rambo” are nice touches but hardly make the song by themselves. This
is the first Pond record in nearly a decade not to have been produced by fellow
Fremantle-ite Kevin Parker (Tame Impala), but both Pond and Parker have been
moving in the direction of glam rock in recent years. The band photo on the
cover of the liner notes evokes the Bee Gees more than Jefferson Airplane.
Allbrook said in an interview with the website Tone Deaf that the band was
looking to do something that was a radical departure from previous releases, and
in some regards, he is correct. This album certainly moves and grooves, just not
in a way that would be regarded as psychedelia. Aside from “America’s Cup” and
the opener, the appealingly bluish slow jam “Song for Agnes,” with ceremonial
chanting from French guest singer Maud Nadal, it is hard to find anything that
stands up to repeated listening. The shuffling beat and flute filigree of the
otherwise dispensable “Take Me Avalon I’m Young” vaguely recall Pizzicato Five’s
“Tokyo’s Coolest Sound” (1991). The buzzy outro to “Pink Lunettes” makes for an
odd coupling with the rest of the song, with a far more relaxed tempo and the
more expansive color palette (even if it is just three notes in a descending
scale placed alongside three in an ascending scale) missing from the
mechanistically churning, frenetic main body of the piece. “Gold Cup/Plastic
Sole,” the penultimate track, slows things down in the service of tunefulness
but comes across as melodramatic; even so, the final iteration of the chorus
swells to a satisfying intensity. Of the four Pond records I have reviewed for
this survey, the clear favorites are
Man It Feels Like Space Again (2015) and
Tasmania (2019); by contrast,
9 rates as compositionally lazy, a kinetically
charged, gentle letdown.
B+
Sample song “America’s Cup”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPOgiy8M2dI
PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCAST-ING, Bright Magic (Test Card Recordings/Play It Again Sam Recordings)—Albums devoted to a single city are rare; memory casts back to the jazz pianist Richie Beirach’s
Impressions of Tokyo: Ancient City of the Future (2010) and not much else. Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) has had a guiding concept for each of its four albums to date, and
Bright Magic was inspired by Berlin. J. Willgoose, Esq., the pseudonymous bandleader and creator, spent time living in Berlin from 2019 onward, where he came to realize that the objective reality of contemporary Berlin is not easily separated from the myths that have been elaborated in and around it, and each person’s conception of the city is in part a fiction of his/her own making. Willgoose took inspiration from a number of sources indigenous to the city or bearing some connection: the poets Anita Berber and Kurt Tucholsky, the photographers/filmmakers Walter Ruttmann, László Moholy-Nagy, Viking Eggeling, and (naturally) Fritz Lang, the author Alfred Döblin (best known for the novel
Berlin Alexanderplatz), the composer Edmund Meisel, the painter Ludwig Meidner, the famed actress Marlene Dietrich. Even David Bowie, who did a series of albums in the late seventies known as the Berlin Trilogy, and Depeche Mode, who recorded their signature smash hit “People Are People” (1984) at Hansa Studios in the city’s Kreuzberg district, find their way in. Ruttmann’s 1930 audio-montage
Wochenende (Weekend) made a powerful impression on Willgoose; he samples it in no fewer than four of the eleven tracks. The album is structured in three parts—the building of the city, the fashioning of myths regarding it, and the “bright magic” (the album title taken from a Döblin volume of stories) of the visual artists that have interpreted their surroundings there—plus a coda. Willgoose’s music bears the hallmarks of PSB’s earlier discs (see the 2013, 2015, and 2017 music surveys): bright, soaring sweeps of arpeggiated figures and atmospheric long tones, fundamentally sunny and optimistic even when the subject matter is grim, as with the fate of coal miners in
Every Valley (2017). The more abstract compositions suffer a bit through stylistic stasis when there is no captivating narrative attached to them, as was the case with
Every Valley or
The Race for Space (2015). But even when resting on his laurels, Willgoose’s acuity and restrained artistic sensibility shine through in his ambient electronic settings. The instrumental pieces that make up a little more than half the record can stand honorably against the sonorities, subtleties, and swells of a Vangelis or Philip Glass soundtrack. Nonetheless,
Bright Magic is most palpably alive in its songs with lyrics, which, coda aside, are clustered in the middle of the tracklist. PSB invited in four Berlin-based performers for these. Blixa Bargeld, a founder of Einstürzende Neubaten and a former member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, narrates his own lyric in a tremulous yet doomy-robotic voice to “Der Rhythmus der Maschinen” (The Rhythm of the Machines), the Fritz Lang/
Metropolis-imbued song, which has mechanical rhythms and syncopations while still managing to sound tamer than Igor Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring industrial passages. Norwegian vocalist EERA (Anna Lena Bruland) sings her own words in a quavery voice to a gently rolling, slow tune, “Gib Mir das Licht” (Give Me the Light), based on a poem by Berber, “Kokain” (Cocaine). But the beating heart of the album is the two songs in between these, “People, Let’s Dance” and “My Blue Heaven.” The lyricist and singer for “People, Let’s Dance” is EERA once more, this time in fuller voice, to a tune that rocks, borrowing its propulsive force from “People Are People.” I am not wild about Andreya Casablanca’s high, breathy voice, but her Marlene Dietrich homage, “Blue Heaven,” gathers momentum until catching full sail, its guitars (Willgoose, with J F Abraham on bass) ringing out breezily. (Casablancas is one-half of the garage rock duo GURR.) The record begins with a couple of instrumentals, each of which samples Ruttmann: “Der Sumpf” (The Swamp), recalling Berlin’s lowly medieval origin, is moody and introspective, with a pulsating motoric theme arising out of the mire; “Im Licht” (In the Light) positively glows with multiple-digit wattage, very much in the mold of the soul-affirming material you might find on the earlier records. Both end abruptly. Though “The Visitor” took Bowie’s
Low (1977) as its touchstone, I hear Vangelis’s
Chariots of Fire soundtrack (1981), in particular, the opening line of the revered Hubert Parry setting of “Jerusalem.” The three “Lichtspiel” (Light-Play) movements that follow, dedicated to Ruttmann, Moholy-Nagy, and Eggeling, respectively, are in turn churchly/throbbing/magisterial, bouncy and processional, and shimmeringly hazy and serene. The record concludes quietly and reflectively with “Ich und die Stadt” (I and the City), a spectral adaptation of an excerpt from Tucholsky’s “Augen in der Großstadt” (Eyes in the Big City), recited by the actress Nina Hoss. A great deal of thought, research, and admiration for Berlin and the artistic figures that have brought it to life and legend went into the making of this album, another signal achievement for PSB, and it shows.
A
QUANTIC & NIDIA GÓNGORA, Almas Conectadas (Tru Thoughts)—As has been the case with previous recordings involving Quantic (Will Holland, a British guitarist/producer who spent a lot of time in Colombia but is currently based in Brooklyn), good intentions outrun the results. The first (self-titled) Ondatrópica record (see the 2012 music survey), which he co-produced, earned good notices; other projects and the subsequent Ondatrópica record (see the 2017 music survey), not so much. For
Almas Conectadas (Connected Souls), he teamed up, for a second time, with Colombian singer Nidia Góngora, originally from the village of Timbiquí, on the heavily Afro-Colombian Pacific coast of the country, which is renowned for the richness of its musical culture. Góngora is an understated, husky vocalist, though, and in this context, the lack of electricity in her voice detracts from the music’s verve, most pointedly in “Macumba de Marea” (Spirit of the Tides). One of the more intriguing compositions/arrangements (one can well envision the swell of the waters and the mystique of what lies beneath), it is nearly sunk by her near-monotone chanting. That is just part of what ails this volume, which is an odd duck of a Latin recording. The orchestration is string-heavy, which can work for certain genres, for example, the
charanga influences powering Cuba’s Los Van Van. Here, it is merely gloppy too often. The title track is a dreamy folk ballad of sorts in an insistent 6/8 meter about the spiritual interconnectedness of souls and their place in nature’s fabric, but Góngora’s voice is quietly a little raucous and the tune a little too rough-hewn for my taste. “Adiós Chacón” relates the tragedy of an eight-year-old boy’s accidental drowning in Timbiquí. Because we are given no insight into the kid’s character, however, and because the music is so placidly amiable, it is hard to share in any sense of loss, and the line about “para salvar un angelito” (in order to save a little angel) just comes across as a maudlin expression of Catholic fatalism. Still harder for me to understand within Catholicism is a tendency to worship Jesus’s individual body parts, as in “Adora la Sangre” (Worship the Blood). This song, an attempt to emulate American gospel/blues, takes the form of a stomp but falls flat, as the singing is robotic; the musicians, largely non-Americans, might have a decent feel for the genre, yet pairing it with this sort of adoration is funky in the less flattering sense of the term, like attending a particularly cheesy church service. Coming across as a hybrid of salsa (for which Cali, where both Holland and Góngora were working, is famed) and cumbia, “El Avión” (The Plane) is a lively affirmation of taking risks to fulfill one’s dreams. Musically, it is anything but inventive, though, more an exercise in dredging up trite salsa motifs. “Vuelve” (Return), at the album’s close, is simply inert. Three of the tracks are short instrumentals; of these, the most affecting is “Pronto Alivio” (Quick Relief), composed as an interlude for string quartet. Lasting just 76 seconds or so, this yearning, searching piece is, in its own small way, the most original and daring on the disc. “Balada Borracha” (Drunken Ballad), the most conventional cumbia on offer, is easygoing and eager to please, its temporary slowing of the rhythm representing the unsteady gait of Timbiquí’s town drunkards. Even more accessible and sensuously ear-friendly is the one straight salsa tune, “El Chiclan,” a remarkably nonjudgmental song about bachelors who live with their parents well into adulthood and never settle down with anyone; its graceful shifting between minor and major modes is a nice touch. Hence, the most appealing songs on
Almas Conectadas are hardly groundbreaking; the most cutting-edge barely takes up a minute; the others, while not without their virtues, catalog a diversity of flaws.
B+/B
REALLY FROM, Really From (Topshelf Recordings)—The Boston band formerly known as People Like You (a somewhat cleverer title than the one they adopted for this recording) will apparently not be heard from again, at least not in its current incarnation, as it has announced an indefinite hiatus. And that is not entirely a bad thing. Really From has a number of things going for it: an appealing lead singer in Michi Tassey, a certain refined artiness—too arty for its own good at times—as might be expected from a collection of Berklee College grads, an original sound that manages to incorporate a jazzy sensibility into what is frequently confessional, even
emo, indie pop. But the album is disjointed and could have used a firmer hand in the producer’s booth to tighten up its compositions and sharpen its focus. Chris Lee-Rodriguez is the bandleader and guitarist, but he ought to set his ego aside long enough to recognize that he is a weak vocalist in contrast to his bandmate (and keyboard player), Tassey. The record would have been considerably more appetizing had she been placed front and center throughout. The lyrics are less than wonderful, but they are at least literate, though too hung up on identity issues, which seem to be the favorite topic du jour of the younger set, for my liking; in an interview with WBUR, the Boston public radio station, band members casually tossed around abominable terms like “Latinx” and “BIPOC.” In some regards, the closing song, “The House,” is the most effective: it is self-contained, unlike most, and its simple acoustic guitar and voice setting works well, my qualms about Lee-Rodriguez as a singer notwithstanding. Even so, in reflecting on the differences that drove the narrator’s parents apart, he verges on self-pitying bleating with “Mom and Dad … told me/They came from different parts/So what does that make me? … Half Boriken or half Chinese? … How can I be whole if their eyes won’t ever meet[?]” A different case could be made for “Yellow Fever,” which Tassey wrote as a protest against the fetishizing of Asian women by white males—to this particular white male, that is somewhat undercut by her glammed-up styling in publicity photos. The song begins as a straight rocker, with nice interplay between a pounding bass and lead guitar, followed by Tassey’s
cri de coeur chorus. Following a stop-time section that gives free play to trumpeter Matt Hull, the chorus returns, dampened at first before regaining its former stridency. “Try Lingual” also shows the band in its best light, starting as soft and pensive under Tassey’s guidance before restating the initial theme as jazz-inflected rock, becoming gradually more frantic and high-strung. Two songs, “The Apartment” and “In the Spaces,” feature short verse sections followed by long-ish instrumental codas. “The Apartment” is shimmery and dreamily impressionistic, if slight, devolving into a meld of soft jazz and progressive rock dialogue between guitar, keys, and horns. Because the vocal portion of “In the Spaces” is anodyne and deliberately robotic in Lee-Rodriguez’s delivery, the song is all about the coda, which is a nice little chorale led by Hull’s horns, multitracked at times, perhaps even with a bit of improvisation. The coda’s emotional payoff so outweighs that of the sung portion that one has to wonder why Lee-Rodriguez even bothered with words. The remainder of the album is far less consequential: awkwardly angsty, melodramatic at times, affronted by alienating questions such as “Where are you from?” For all the lyrics’ earnestness, the music’s flabby structure and untamed raucousness undercut them. Look for Michi Tassey to continue to develop her own solo career and for Matt Hull to appear as a valued sideman with other bands.
B+/B
ROSS FROM FRIENDS, Tread (Brainfeeder)—Of the Brit-produced electronica featured in this edition of the survey, Ross from Friends, known to his family as Felix Clary Weatherall, is more oriented toward techno and house music than Koreless’s
Agor (see above) and engages more directly in sampling. (The performing name begs explanation: Weatherall was working in a studio a decade ago that had a television with a DVD stuck so that it would only play episodes of
Friends.) Four tracks in particular specify the music Weatherall is sampling. The opener, “The Daisy,” named for an opening move toward solving Rubik’s Cube, purports to take a snippet from “Give It Up” by Rain: A Lil Louis Painting, a
nu-disco-type tune, but if you listen to that, it is hard to tell where it is incorporated; Ross from Friends uses a different female voice, singing an unrelated, plangent melody, and sets it to a crisp
dubstep breakbeat and moony descending synthesizer tones. The sampling is more obvious on “Revellers,” which borrows the opening from Zoom’s 1979 disco cut “Flying High” for a percolating composition with a synthetic, rubbery texture that is somewhere between straight disco and Hot Butter’s version of “Popcorn” from 1972, with echoes of steel pan music in the keyboards. Likewise, “XXX Olympiad” borrows freely from the vocals of the 1973 soul number “For Your Precious Love” by the Invitations; this strikes me as an attempt by the producer to send a jolt of human spirit into the Frankenstein monster that is this mechanistic (more bouncy synths, more breakbeats) yet moody, almost luridly lethargic, track; the graft is interestingly seamy if not entirely successful. “Life in a Mind” weirdly processes Lisa Millett’s vocal from the Lab Rats Present the Experiment’s version from a few years back of Patti Labelle’s 1979 disco song “Music Is My Way of Life.” The voice comes at the listener from the beginning as a startling attack that recalls Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Child Soldier” (see the 2011 music survey). Its processing is basically the entire piece, the arrangement being merely another cluster of mournfully descending keys (yes, Weatherall does have his favored patterns). Other tracks might not have documented excerpts from other songs but bring in (nearly always uncredited) voices in any case. “Brand New Start,” for example, engages both female and male voices, the latter of which could be Weatherall’s but most likely is not, for a slow-swinging R&B number. Darcey Williams’s softly bleating voice is featured in “Love Divide” as an emulsifier, linking the lyrical pauses in which her voice is central with the sections of rhythmic jumpiness that characterize the rest of the piece, in which the vocals move in a concurrent stream. Redolent of Africa is “Spatter/Splatter,” with its percussive emphasis and monotone chorus, the chanting like a klaxon missing its high note. “Run” spends nearly half its six-minute length on a quiet keyboard intro before acquiring a pumping, dotted-note rhythm, with handclaps and cartoonish distorted voices as the occasional backdrop; the sound ratchets up in intensity without actually building toward anything, unfortunately. Indeed, the main issue I take with the quasi-instrumental compositions such as this one or “Grub” is that, while the settings are plenty imaginative, as “house” grooves, their development is minimal to nonexistent. “Grub” at least briefly devolves into a gentle pianistic rumination that cleverly plays off the harmonics of the tune as a whole. The album’s capper, in two parts, “Thresho,” is named after a software plug-in Weatherall devised to record automatically any time sound in the studio rises above a certain decibel threshold; it has a serene appeal that is disrupted by “outside” noises at the climax before resuming its loping gait. As Ross from Friends, Weatherall shows an impressive facility with sound production and arrangements that bring genuine emotion into what could have been bloodless electronic wizardry, playing off nostalgia one moment, jarring the listener at another. Perhaps I am disrespecting the conventions of the genre to want still more, in terms of compositional depth and inventiveness, yet I do all the same.
A-
SAINT ETIENNE, I’ve Been Trying to Tell You (Heavenly Recordings/Play It Again Sam Records)—Not precisely a soundtrack album since the half-length travelogue film of the same title by British photographer Alisdair McLellan was designed to accompany the record, not the other way round, still Saint Etienne’s latest bears many of the hallmarks of a soundtrack. The music is ambient, eschewing conventional song structures, a departure for the band, whose membership has been remarkably constant over the course of its three-decade career: Sarah Cracknell as singer and Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley on various instruments, here accompanied by Augustin Bousfield, who plays guitars and some keyboards. Six of the eight tracks incorporate samples from other songs, mostly fairly obscure (to me, in any case, less so to Brits). Best known of these is likely Natalie Imbruglia’s “Beauty on the Fire” (miscredited here as “Beauty on Fire”), from 2001/2002, without which the song “Pond House” would be merely the sum of its delectable arrangements: popping percussion, handbells, zoomy electric keyboards, a bit of funk guitar chords. For the opener, “Music Again,” Saint Etienne nicely embroiders the guitar line that opens up the English R&B “girl group” Honeyz’s “Love of a Lifetime” (1998/1999), extending it and warping it slightly over the course of the song and superimposing its own, regretful vocal foray. “Little K” imports the opening instrumentation of Samantha Mumba’s “’Til the Night Becomes the Day” (2000), bell-like percussion and a harp sequence that sounds weirdly akin to “just had my Cheerios” from a 1970s jingle about “feelin’ groovy.” By layering on additional percussion, along with a repeated four-note vocal pattern and some spoken reminiscences, “Little K” becomes something more than its source material, but not all that much more. The sampling from Lighthouse Family’s “Raincloud” (1997) on “Fonteyn” is far less obvious, some moody chord changes perhaps. The song sampled is more openly upbeat, though “Fonteyn” is hardly a downer, just dreamy and more relaxed. Cracknell’s humming and soft phrasing on this song evoke Bebel Gilberto, from her
Tanto Tempo (2000) period, which happens to fall during the era of music Saint Etienne is memorializing here, 1997–2001, a time of lost innocence by the band’s reckoning. Similarly, the sampling from the Lightning Seeds’ “Joy,” which actually predates the chosen era by harking back to 1989/1990, is very subtle on “Penlop,” whose wistful nostalgia is sweetened by its having, unusually for this record, a genuine refrain, sung over and over by Cracknell, not to mention a countermelody of sorts. “Broad River” lifts the pretty instrumental backing track (guitar, piano, and light percussion) from Tasmin Archer’s “Ripped Inside,” also from a slightly earlier period (1992), and that is essentially the entirety of the piece, apart from some sonorous cushioning atmospherics and hummed phrases, ending with a brief sung verse. Fuzzy, impressionistic, a sort of distorted carousel theme, and not a little repetitious, “Blue Kite” is the only pure instrumental on the disc and, like its successor, “I Remember It Well,” samples no song at all. “I Remember It Well” rates high on special effects—the sustained, high choral tones and sampled snatches of ordinary conversations one can barely make out—yet the broad theme that emerges is a little bland, and, like everything else on
I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, it never really varies, yielding a suspended-in-amber sensation. Saint Etienne has made a pretty record, one with some inventive and succulent orchestrations, but it is still wallpaper—background music at best. Sigh.
B+
SLEIGH BELLS, Texis (Torn Clean/Mom + Pop Records)—In an interview with
Consequence, Derek Miller, the guitarist/ composer/ arranger/lyricist of Sleigh Bells, admitted, “We stopped worrying about whether or not we’re in or out of our comfort zone, or if we were being repetitive or formulaic.” Since it had been five years since the last full-length LP,
Jessica Rabbit (see the 2016 music survey), this is not entirely a bad thing. Sleigh Bells knows what it is good at and continues to deliver on it. But a bit more than a decade on from the band’s raucous, clever debut,
Treats (see the 2010 music survey), the power to astonish has dissipated, and the growing flirtation with conventional pop seems like sanding the edges off the
noise rock with which Sleigh Bells made its name. To be sure, Miller still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, revealing several good ones over the record’s course, most exceptionally in the closer, “Hummingbird Bomb,” a tune that purports to contemplate the extinction crisis and what might happen if the affected species had the means to fight back. The tight syncopations and contrasts between the electronic squeaks that punctuate the harmonic cycle (which itself has a delicate, music box timbre) and the buffeting percussion to lead off the song are masterfully conceived. Beyond that, it is less interesting, and that points to one of the chief issues I have with
Texis: its melodies, which are developed and sung by Miller’s band partner, Alexis Krauss, range from the sublime to the pedestrian, with far more of the latter taking up this short record’s second half. Krauss’s capabilities as a singer are first-rate as ever: eschewing the abrasiveness that served her on certain songs from the older discs, she can sound honeyed or mock cheerleader, or both in quick succession, as on “Locust Laced,” something of a throwback to
Treats, with only the acrid tone of Miller’s guitar cutting the sweetness. With its stop-time passages and abrupt changes in mood and tempo, “Locust Laced” is one of the album’s most complex tunes. Its sweet-and-sour nature is complemented by “Justine Go Genesis,” a brisk number whose phrases are capped by one of Miller’s characteristic drilling guitar attacks. Sprinkled with glancing, winking, contextless allusions to Nirvana and the Beatles (and, quite likely, a novel by the Marquis de Sade), “Justine Go Genesis” is a puzzling title, paired with a lyric it is hard to make heads or tails of, apart from the evocative “I’m a concrete girl/in a cavity world.” The melding of Krauss’s tune and Miller’s arrangement reaches its peak in “An Acre Lost,” notwithstanding its jittery, hypercaffeinated restlessness, moving between shadow and sun to generate real pathos with the line, “If I should wake before I die/Knock me out for heaven’s sake.” The opening song, “Sweet75,” has basically just one musical idea but plays it to the hilt, displaying the combination of sugar-and-spice from Krauss (vulnerability and sass) and power chords from her counterpart. Several questions that cannot be answered here: Why is a band of avowed nonbelievers singing about praying the rosary (in “Rosary”) in times of need? What exactly are “Tennessee Tips”? And just why is the album titled
Texis anyway? Sleigh Bells still earns decent marks; the high points have a glorious exuberance mixed with cartoonishness, while the lesser songs are not at all bad. But the duo seem to be coasting and might need to try something entirely new in order to recapture the music world’s acclaim, as attended to
Treats years back.
B+
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, Entertainment, Death (Saddle Creek Records)—Experimen- tation gone awry; that sums up Spirit of the Beehive’s fourth album. Parts of it try hard to push boundaries, as in the second track (and first single), “There’s Nothing You Can’t Do,” or the second-to-last, “I Suck the Devil’s Cock,” which is the longest by a good stretch at nearly seven minutes. “There’s Nothing You Can’t Do” rides its dreamtime, yearning groove hard before dissolving into distortion and shouting that becomes pretty intense before lapsing back into the title slogan and sampled chatter that began the piece. “I Suck the Devil’s Cock” is a composition with multiple, more or less unrelated, sections. Some have rapid-cycling guitar harmonics, as with the six-note “devil” sequence that leads off, accompanied by
Sprechstimme, while others are abstract noise and still others more openly songlike, with a woozy psychedelia, leading to the final quarter, which is like a lesser “Man It Feels Like Space Again” by the Aussie psych outfit Pond (see the 2015 music survey). In fact, portions of the record do aspire to neo-pyschedelia, and at times it even hits the mark, notably in the second single, “The Server Is Immersed,” but also in bits of “Wake Up (in Rotation).” “The Server Is Immersed” features intriguingly twisty guitarwork as well as some nice trade-offs between the singers, Zack Schwartz and Rivka Ravede. Elsewhere, as in “Bad Son” or “Rapid & Complete Recovery,” the model is perhaps the Philadelphia “blue-eyed soul” of Hall and Oates. But when the impulse toward investigating sonic breakthroughs slackens, too often what we get is a sort of aimless mellowness for its own sake, if one that has been processed through the aural equivalent of a funhouse mirror (viz. “It Might Take Some Time”).
Entertainment, Death is bracketed by two songs called “Entertainment” and “Death.” The first of these has a sunnily lyrical interval of ninety seconds or so following a minute of white noise. The latter begins lyrically, but perhaps because of its title, it keeps being dragged toward pallidness—descending a scale into oblivion? Whether it says anything illuminating about the relationship between the two concepts is a matter of interpretation, but I lean toward no. Spirit of the Beehive has done better work previously (see the 2018 music survey); for all we know, the band is simply working out the kinks on the way to developing an entirely new musical vocabulary. But I am not holding my breath.
B
TURNSTILE, Glow On (Roadrunner Records/Warner Music Group)—The chameleon nature of Glow On, the third full-length studio album from Baltimore’s Turnstile, appears to be a departure for these guys, erstwhile specialists in hardcore punk. The punkiness certainly has not been blanched out of the music—there is plenty of punchy energy, and nearly all of the record’s fifteen tracks are between two and three minutes long, typical for the genre. But the multiracial fivesome shows an impressive facility with a range of pop styles in the course of the album’s thirty-five minutes. Lead singer Brendan Yates at times sounds uncannily like Cedric Bixler-Zavala of the Mars Volta, and inevitably like the late Freddie Mercury as well. At other times, the guitar attacks are similar in nature to those of Derek Miller of Sleigh Bells (see above). The musical ideas expounded are fairly simple, yet the band mixes it up a little with rhythmic changes, as in “Humanoid/Shake It Up” or toward the end of “Blackout,” or harmonic flourishes such as the keyboard countermelody in “Don’t Play” (reiterated later as a Van Halen–esque guitar flourish) that alters the song’s tenor. Most intriguing is “Underwater Boi,” the only track to exceed three minutes (barely), which begins with a Caribbean languidness and a bit of whistling before launching into the airily pleasant main theme. But this theme quickly devolves into a chorus dominated by crunching bass chords. “Holiday” swings back and forth between glowering, quasi-futuristic guitar and woodblock percussion and raucous exhortation. A ruminating introductory piano theme sets the tone (swoony and interrogative) for “Fly Again,” which laments repeatedly, “Still can’t fill the hole you left behind.” “New Heart Design” is a throwback to the eighties new wave of Naked Eyes or Talk, Talk, but with a harder edge to its chorus and an odd coda that features a wayward and incongruously sunny solo guitar line and a sampling of a child pleading for his father to come home. Whereas “No Surprise” sounds like nothing if not a flight of fancy sung by Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) of Animal Collective, more like an intro to an Animal Collective song since it fades off after just forty-five seconds. “T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection)” is the most poundingly percussive offering (though it has competition from “Wild Wrld”), yet even this track softens and becomes reflective in its closing measures as it pauses on a lyric borrowed from Sly and the Family Stone. Two tracks feature Blood Orange (Devonté Hynes), whose electronica, R&B, and hip-hop blends at the outset seem an odd pairing for this group. But “Alien Love Call” is one of the slowest and most relaxed songs here, its angst notwithstanding, channeling surf guitar from an earlier era and ending with Hynes reciting some poetry about the nature of love. The other track that is a collaboration, the hard-driving “Lonely Dezires,” feels more like Turnstile and less like Blood Orange, Hynes's singing notwithstanding. Aided by the production of Mike Elizondo, who came up through the world of hip-hop but has worked with an impressive range of pop artists and even Lin-Manuel Miranda, Turnstile has forged an eclectic disc that sports an ear-catching, zippy pop sensibility without sacrificing the raw power and rough surfaces that are the band’s stock in trade. A-
THE WAR ON DRUGS, I Don’t Live Here Anymore (Atlantic Records)—With some records, it is just hard to get past the glaring deficiencies of their lyrics. Adam Granduciel’s grandiosity is one thing, but it is the incoherence of the messaging that repeatedly confounds, magnifying the irritation provoked by the album’s relentless solipsism. Practically every other verse begins in the first-person singular, including the album’s title track. What is the listener to make of stanzas such as “I remember darkness overhead/Honey I’m a victim of my own desire/I can’t change it/Should I keep moving?” Not exactly on a par with Gerard Manley Hopkins or Thomas Gray—all right, those are unfair comparisons but still…. More the pity since the compositions are not bad, the reason why this release made numerous top-fifty album lists. Decidedly better than the flaccid, uninspiring
A Deeper Understanding (see the 2017 music survey), it still falls short of
Lost in the Dream (see the 2014 music survey). The songs mine heavily a vein of Americana rock, with some modern studio updates. (Granduciel also produced the record, in addition to penning the words and the bulk of the composition.) It was an interesting choice to incorporate the eclectic country/folk/pop band Lucius into the title track; Jessica Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s vocals enrich and give fresh dimension to what might otherwise be a bland chorus, with little to differentiate it from the song’s verse section (the same guitar accompaniment of descending triplet figurations runs throughout). Though “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” recollects going to a show by Granduciel’s hero, Bob Dylan, much of the disc’s material more closely pairs with vintage Bob Seger (though their voices are not at all similar), notably Seger’s “Against the Wind” (1980)—hold it up against the reflective, satisfyingly “classic rock” single “Change” from the current album—or even with Bryan Adams or Bruce Springsteen. Much of the record engages in vignettes of spiritual restlessness and physical movement, progressing through stages of life with a heavy dose of introspection. A number of songs, such as the gentle guitar-and-piano ballad that kicks off the tracklist, “Living Proof,” or the moody chamber piece “I Don’t Wanna Wait” (not at all like the
Dawson’s Creek theme song, which starts with the identical words), are fetching without being sufficiently convincing to champion as a cause. “Harmonia’s Dream” and “Wasted” are rousing, with a galloping pace, and “Victim” sets out an appealingly crepuscular, pumping keyboard ostinato, yet they are otherwise undistinguished, with the last of these in particular suffering from a lack of development beyond the initial theme. “Old Skin” and “Rings around My Father’s Eyes” recycle certain imagery from each other; both are ruminative in the band’s characteristically baffling, ponderous way, although the former holds together better and is more intriguing from a songwriting perspective. Enlisting Lucius was an experiment that paid some dividends for the War on Drugs; perhaps, in following up with possibilities for further collaboration, Granduciel can seek out someone to write clearer, tighter lyrics in service of his tunes.
B+
Sample song “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” (featuring Lucius): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVh6XTwWhMY
A WINGED VICTORY FOR THE SULLEN, Invisible Cities/Le Cittá Invisibili (Artificial Pinearch/Ninja Tune)—More a series of drawn-out vignettes than true compositions,
Invisible Cities, named for an Italo Calvino novel, falls shy of the greatness A Winged Victory for the Sullen reached with its previous outing,
The Undivided Five (see the 2019 music survey). That record’s minimalist figurations and passages were deployed in the service of a grander objective, a sort of Debussy for the twenty-first century, with its mixture of electronics and acoustic instruments. The newer album is suitably atmospheric, with lovely pianism (as in “The Divided City”) as well as strings (as with the harp arpeggios coursing through “Nothing of the City Touches the Earth”) and, occasionally, a choir furnished by Budapest-based orchestral musicians and singers, but as a pure listening experience, it leaves one wanting more in terms of exposition and development. The music was devised to accompany a multimedia theatrical production based on Calvino’s work, basically a dance score, that premiered in Manchester in 2019 and then embarked on a worldwide tour that, like all nonvirtual cultural activity, was cut short by the pandemic. The record is slightly less than half the length of the original production. Although I can appreciate the mastery of composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, I am not a minimalism fan at heart, so it should surprise no one to hear me state that the pieces that generate the most activity here, “Thirteenth Century Travelogue” and especially the final track, “Total Perspective Vortex,” are the most lively and engaging. Its title notwithstanding, “Thirteenth Century Travelogue” is the most futuristic (and shortest) composition, its eerie sustained tones punctuated by juddering percussion,
wah-wah-ing bass, and tinkly, ascending piano figures. “Total Perspective Vortex,” the closing number, rises out of an introductory minute of shimmering tones into a sea of ominous bass and distorted attacks, becoming fairly intense until suddenly relinquishing the noise about two-thirds of the way through, pulling its punches just as things were getting spiky. The album ends with more somber long tones. The lead-in to “Total Perspective Vortex,” “Desires Are Already Memories,” makes use of the choir, but its chord progressions are sepulchral and suffocatingly devoid of hope. Not all that much happens in “Every Solstice & Equinox,” yet the undulating synthesizer chords midway through evoke the slow, quiet passages in the middle of Yes’s epic “Gates of Delirium” (1974), and the same can be said for “The Merchants of Seven Nations.” The opener, “So that the City Can Begin to Exist,” dictates the tone for the album with its hushed but chilly piano mini-forays over droning synths, changing up the chord pattern just once, midway, for variety’s sake—very much a soundtrack setting. “Only Strings and Their Supports Remain” and the song that follows it, “There Is One of Which You Never Speak,” set up contrasting violin arpeggiations. But the latter also employs the same keyboard chord progression used in the opener as a counterweight, eventually dissolving into crinkly white noise. Although both string figurations are rather severe, that for “Only Strings and Their Supports Remain” is freighted with more pathos, undercut only by its rigid metronomic tempo. “Despair Dialogue” is not quite as claustrophobic as “Desires Are Already Memories” but frigidly gelatinous all the same. The second entry in the tracklist, “The Celestial City,” makes room for some (occluded) sunshine, but the sensation does not last, as airlessly baleful synth progressions take over. It is pointless to speculate on how different things might have been had Covid-19 not curtailed the original dramatic production. Suffice it to say that while
Invisible Cities has its share of aural pleasures, it is somewhat hollow at its core.
A-/B+
MISCELLANEOUS (GENRE-FLUID)
FLOATING POINTS, PHAROAH SANDERS & THE LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, Promises (Luaka Bop)—A seemingly unlikely friendship developed between Sam Shepherd, the 35-year-old (or so) Englishman and electronic performer/ producer behind the alias Floating Points, and the legendary jazz tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, more than twice Shepherd’s age, when Sanders was impressed by Floating Points’
Elaenia (see the 2015 music survey) and proposed that they work together on an album. This came together in 2019 in Los Angeles’s Sargent Recorders studios, with the addition of the string section of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). At the time
Elaenia came out, I noted that it was too minimalist for my taste, and the same could be said of this collaboration. In some ways, it is an impressive feat of arranging and production, and Sanders amply showed why he is revered among the jazz cognoscenti. But over the course of 46 minutes, as basically a single piece of music,
Promises delivers too much stasis and not enough exposition and development to be truly compelling. The composition/album is divided almost arbitrarily into nine tracks, or “movements”; there is no pause between the movements, with the exception of the eighth going into the ninth, and only the subtlest of distinctions between them, with considerable spillover. Shepherd, using a combination of keyboards (both acoustic and electric piano, organ, celesta, harpsichord, synthesizers), devised a repeating flourish, an outburst of eight or so notes, that serves as a sort of
ostinato, as it is heard throughout nearly all of the work. But it does not actually mark time in this rhythmless composition, and its novelty wears thin long before the piece ends. Beyond that, Shepherd limits his own active participation to atmospherics, providing sustained tones for effect and in support of the other musicians. Sanders’s sax expresses a tenuous, meandering through line of song, with lots of space around the phrasing, in the lengthy opening movement, whether composed or improvised entirely, I cannot tell. He soon disappears, until Movement 4, where his actual voice is heard, humming almost in imitation of a standing bass, before he resumes playing. For Movement 6, he drops out again in favor of the LSO strings, only to come back in strength in the following movement. Shepherd is skillful in insinuating the orchestra into the composition—a solo violin at first, then more than one, then the entire ensemble. The ensemble passages are
tremolo-heavy and even schmaltzy at times, but other sections are, cleverly, a kind of string-drawn obverse image of the tenor sax theme. The climax of Movement 7 is, in Sanders’s rendering, pretty raucous following a muted,
legato beginning, but toward the end, his sax peters out, never to be heard again. (Sanders died at age 81, a year and a half after this record’s release.) The somnolent Movement 8 takes on renewed interest when it culminates in a set of organ chords that vaguely nod to Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (1967) or Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up” (1972). The brief final movement is disjointed not only physically but thematically from the rest. Gone are the ostinato and the horns, though the strings of the LSO return, with a violinist momentarily suggesting a piercing motif straight out of Béla Bartók. But this quickly dies away with no resolution—I am not sure why this last track is even here, given that it seems unrelated and leads to nowhere. The widespread critical acclaim for
Promises is not entirely unjustified, but it is overdone.
A-/B+
JOHN ZORN, Parables (Tzadik)—Composition for three acoustic guitars might seem unusual, yet, according to the website Strings by Mail, “the repertoire for three guitars is surprisingly rich, with works by Isaac Albéniz, Dušan Bogdanović, Jean-Michel Coquery, Jürg Kindle, Annette Kruisbrink, Jean-Maurice Mourat, Thierry Tisserand, and Antonio Vivaldi, among many others.” For the incredibly prolific John Zorn, a master of many genres,
Parables is not his first (nor his last) three-guitar venture but part of a series that began with just two guitarists, Julian Lage and Gyan Riley, for the initial two records, before longtime collaborator Bill Frisell joined the company. I was familiar with Frisell’s work, and Lage, although only in his mid-thirties, has already made a name for himself in jazz and related genres. Gyan Riley was new to me; it turns out he is the son of the famed minimalist composer Terry Riley. Although
Parables is said by its marketing materials to draw upon Hebrew and Sufic traditions, as well as sources closer to home such as bluegrass and jazz, most of the eleven short pieces by Zorn are not tinged with exoticism, notwithstanding the mystic/Eastern song titles and album packaging with quasi-Moorish designs. The prime exception is the heavily syncopated “Caravansary,” which does employ Turkish/Middle Eastern modal figurations, though “A Perfumed Scorpion,” named after a book about Sufist philosophy by Idries Shah (1978), can also be included here. With three accomplished guitarists under his baton (he conducted as well as composing all the music), Zorn could have them play more or less in unison, or he could put them at cross-purposes, as in the opening song, “The Mountain Path.” This tune begins brightly before some clouds move in, and soon we are being buffeted by crosswinds—perhaps this is a musical representation of the way trails sometimes branch into multiple slight variants around trees or shrubs or rocks, leading a hiker to puzzle about how best to reach the destination. The gentler and more consonant numbers, “The Magic Monastery,” “At the Crossroads,” “Light Weaving,” recall the sunny acoustic folk of Buck Curran (see the 2016 and 2018 music surveys) and, occasionally, Steve Hackett’s solo miniature with Genesis, “Horizons” (1972). The more percussive songs, “The Broken Window” and especially “The Boiling Cauldron” and “Secret of the Locked Room,” use the guitar frame as well as the strings at times. The frenetic “Boiling Cauldron” really does suggest the turbulence of a large, bubbling pot, and its stop-start action gives it the sense of being a longer composition than it actually is. “Secret of the Locked Room” is appropriately furtive and playful, not to mention tonally wayward. Some of Zorn’s cartoonish elements from earlier records (a minute portion of his vast output) make their way into “The Broken Window,” “The Boiling Cauldron,” and, particularly, “The Three Domains,” in which the guitarists deliberately indulge in string squeaking, which is effected by sliding one’s fingers across the fretboard.
Parables may not be among the more substantive or incisive volumes in John Zorn’s monumental curriculum vitae, but it is well done all the same and offers enduring pleasures. It is truly remarkable that he can continue to put out material of such quality at such a high volume, in so many different musical disciplines.
A-
Sample song [no videos/audio available for this record]
CLASSICAL
As is customary, I will not assign grades to classical albums.
HILARY HAHN (violin), Paris ([Ernest Chausson,
Poème; Sergei Profokiev, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 in D Major; Einojuhani Rautavaara,
Deux Sérénades] Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Mikko Franck) (Deutshce Grammophon)—These three compositions would seem to have little in common, apart from the obvious that they all are works for violin and orchestra. But they all have a connection to Paris, hence the album title. The elegiac tone poem by Ernest Chausson,
Poème, was not only written by a Parisian native, but it was dedicated to the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who was the teacher of the Russian-American violinist Jascha Brodsky, who in turn was Hilary Hahn’s teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Sergei Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto had its world premiere in Paris in 1923, a full six years after he completed it. The
Deux Sérénades of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara were actually written for Hahn and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France to premiere in Paris, based on the composer’s 1990 opera,
The House of the Sun. Rautavaara died in 2016, before the full orchestration of the second serenade, “Sérénade pour la Vie,” was finished, so the task of completing it fell to fellow Finnish composer Kalevi Aho. The Profokiev concerto contains some intervals of poignant lyricism, as is the case with the Rautavaara “Sérénade pour Mon Amour,” but it has plenty of agitated passages, busy and buzzy, as well as playful sections such as the entirety of the second-movement Scherzo, and Hahn herself describes it as “incredibly difficult to play.” The second Rautavaara serenade begins pastorally, evoking the Finnish countryside, and, like the first, it is fluid and lyrical although not without its moments of bittersweet and anguish. Oddly, the last set of measures becomes greatly sped up and vigorously syncopated to conclude the piece.
