MUSIC 2022: A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield
December 31, 2023
GENERAL COMMENTS
Now that 2023 is coming to an end, 2022 is mostly a blur. By the end of the year, we finally seemed to be emerging cautiously from Pandemic World, and yet Covid-19 still lingers stubbornly. Vladimir Putin, in the biggest miscalculation of his career, launched a brutal and unprovoked war against Ukraine that continues to this day. The U.S. Supreme Court set back women’s rights by 50 years and callously endangered the health of thousands.
In the world of music, Drake and Olivia Rodrigo each won a bunch of awards. Whether they deserved to is not a question I plan to dwell on here, although I do think Rodrigo’s pretty dreadful, judging by her performance on Saturday Night Live recently. Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s former bandleader, won a Grammy for album of the year, which was certainly more merited.
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Jon Batiste
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There were no live musical performances we attended worth remarking on for the year. However, on a trip through Ontario and Michigan in August, we discovered that a street in Kingston, Ontario, has been renamed The Tragically Hip Way, after the rock band that had its origins in that lakeside city.
I will go through the roster of notable deaths from 2022 but will start with one with particular impact for me: Mimi Parker of the highly regarded dream pop band Low, from Duluth, Minnesota, died in November of that year following a two-year battle with ovarian cancer. She was just 55. Meat Loaf departed for that rock’n’roll kitchen in the sky, possibly a Covid victim. Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac. Olivia Newton John. Anita Pointer of the Pointer Sisters. Irene Cara. Vangelis. Naomi Judd. King Crimson’s and Foreigner’s Ian McDonald. Jim Seals of Seals and Crofts. Andrew Woolfolk of Earth, Wind & Fire. Bert Ruiter of Focus. Yanick Étienne of Roxy Music. Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age). Alec John Such (Bon Jovi). Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode. Alan White, who drummed for both Yes and the Plastic Ono Band. Soundtrack composer Angelo Badalamenti. Rab Noakes of Stealer’s Wheel. Keith Levene of the Clash and Public Image Ltd. Tyrone Downie of Bob Marley and the Wailers. D. H. Peligro of the Dead Kennedys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Noel Duggan of Clannad. Darryl Hunt of the Pogues. Paul Ryder of Happy Mondays. Anton Fier of the Lounge Lizards, the Golden Palominos, and the Feelies. Two members of Procol Harum. Two members of the Tubes. Two members of Ash Ra Tempel, including Klaus Schulze, who was also in Tangerine Dream. Legends from various genres: Loretta Lynn, Jerry Lee Lewis, Pharoah Sanders (see the 2021 music survey), Gal Costa. Ronnie Spector. Producer Thom Bell. Coolio—who could ever forget Coolio? (Many did.) Last but not least, from the wider world of entertainment, two “prominent” deaths: Ric Parnell, who played drummer Mick Shrimpton in This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and was briefly (twice) a real drummer in Atomic Rooster, and, at age 93, Bernard Cribbins, who not only sang the novelty song “Right Said Fred” in 1962 but played two roles in Doctor Who, separated by more than four decades, most recently as Wilfred Mott, the grandfather of the Doctor’s companion Donna Noble.
My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2022, to my friend Richard Katz and to my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Ariel, for their support, and to my partner, now fiancée, Melissa, for her unending forbearance as I spend my holiday week “with her” at the end of December maniacally trying to finish the music survey. Thanks as well to Alexa Robertson for furnishing translations of Swedish song titles by Dungen.
The year’s clear winner was Lucrecia Dalt, a newcomer to this survey, if hardly a rookie performer. Her album is artful and eclectic, dark at times without being terminally somber, furtive in the manner of fellow South American Juana Molina, yet not divorced from its Latin rhythmic origins. Other albums worth consideration were Matmos’s tribute to the late Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer, Animal Collective’s first album in six years, and Metric’s first in four years.
My list of the Top Twelve (of the pops) for the year follows:
1. Lucrecia Dalt, ¡Ay!
2. Matmos, Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer
3. Metric, Formentera
4. Animal Collective, Time Skiffs
5. Dungen, En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog
6. Jockstrap, I Love You Jennifer B
7. Dry Cleaning, Stumpwork
8. Goat, Oh Death
9. Adrian Quesada, Adrian Quesada Presents Boleros Psicodélicos
10. The Mars Volta, The Mars Volta
11. Yīn Yīn, The Age of Aquarius
12. Smile, Phantom Island
ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR
LUCRECIA DALT, ¡Ay! (RVNG Intl.)—Insert an R and a T in between the letters of this album’s very short title and you get the spirit of its creation. Composed and recorded in Berlin with financial support from the German federal government, it is a hipster’s salad of
delicias, as probably no one in Latin America has ever said. Born and raised in Pereira, a city in the coffee-growing region of west-central Colombia, Lucrecia Dalt trained as a geological engineer before turning her attention to music in the early years of the new millennium. Now residing in Germany, she has, if not already arrived, truly come into her own with
¡Ay!, which
The Wire earlier declared record of the year. In some regards, the album’s sonic experimentation and breathy vocals welcome comparison with Laurie Anderson, Lena Platonos, or fellow South American Juana Molina (see the 2008, 2013, and 2017 music surveys), but Dalt is sui generis, too peculiar and too original to be lumped in with anyone. Vocally capable, she nonetheless limits her actual singing on the record, sometimes just voicing the lyrics and at other times deliberately constricting her range, accompanied at times by an eclectic set of woodwinds, trumpet, and/or standing bass. She references her former professional background as well as other crypto-scientific musings throughout the disc, via imagery of rocks and fossils marking the record of time over eons. For all the institutionally backed artiness (there, I said it), Dalt has not entirely divorced herself from her indie pop origins; Latin rhythms still insinuate many of the tracks; even as tremulous and echoey a song as “Gena” has a characteristically Caribbean percussion line. As does “Enviada” (Envoy), whose bass and flute set up a film noir ambience, while Dalt’s sighing, ponderous voice only adds to a growing sense of dread; when she moves into the chorus, it is a sudden splash of color that manages not to brighten the disposition; following a shuddering instrumental screech, things go back to the crepuscular that preceded the chorus. The furtive, Molina-like quiet of “Contenida” (Contained), following a bridge of stasis, erupts into powerful ripples of synthesizer that evoke “Darkness” from Peter Gabriel’s
Up (2002).
¡Ay! kicks off with a lushly idyllic, tropical slow piece, “No Tiempo” (No Time), rich in clarinet, flute, trumpet, and percussion, as well as, atypically, a dreamy sung melody. The contrast set up by “El Galatzó” is instantaneous—here, she does not sing at all (her backing vocalists do), and a springy tension underlies the dusky torpor. “Atemporal” (Timeless) is powered by a gently rocking syncopation, even as the atmospherics remain cavernously dim, with the singer observing in the nearby rock patterns a sense of time suspended. As with several songs, including “El Galatzó,” “Atemporal” ends abruptly, as with a truncated feint toward another verse. Even in tonally more neutral compositions such as “No Tiempo,” “Dicen” (They Say), and “La Desmesura” (Disproportion), the dank sense of claustrophobia and obsidian shadings predominate. Although the overall mood of the album is somber and portentous, Dalt switches things up somewhat toward the end. “Bochinche” (The Mess) is a major-tone, playful little processional, the most “Latin” selection on the disc, in which her ethereal backing vocals (aided by Camille Mandoki) aerate the declarations and protestations of her main theme, which has only the rudiments of melody. The Epilogue is instrumental, its mellifluous organ shimmers resembling something you might hear when exiting an old-time movie palace, helping to defuse the trepidation set up by “Enviada” but also strangely detached from the rest of the record, ending in a few drumrolls and quavery clarinet toungings. Though
¡Ay! is a brief record, at less than thirty-five minutes, it is anything but slight. Rather, it is a fully conceived statement by an artist whose creative possibilities we may only have sampled at the margins.
A
And the rest . . .
ALVVAYS, Blue Rev (Polyvinyl Record Co.)—The postpandemic follow-up to the moderately well-regarded
Antisocialites (see the 2017 music survey),
Blue Rev marks a slight step backward for the Toronto-based, nearly all-female band Alvvays. Songs are pop-fizzy and energetic, and, as on the predecessor, short, but most of them come and go leaving little imprint. Two are tributes to other singers: “Tom Verlaine” pays homage to the lead singer of the New York punk outfit Television, who by the time of the song’s release was seriously ill and would die in January 2023; “Belinda Says” tips its cap to Belinda Carlisle, the onetime Go-Go’s frontwoman before going out on a solo career. Do not expect anything remotely like Television from “Tom Verlaine”; it is typically
shoegaze-y, a sweet kernel of melody at the chorus emerging from a nimbus of formless, blurry guitarwork, and “Belinda Says” is quite similar, if more of a gauzy, drowsy reverie, with an allusion to “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” (1987) near the end. What is not strictly shoegazing generally falls under the rubric of
dream pop, though there are more actively jangly tunes such as “After the Earthquake,” like the Byrds on speed (except for its low, slow bridge), or “Pressed,” as well. Much of the album is capably tuneful, if somewhat ho-hum, lightweight with melodies that ingratiate but are never enlightening or revelatory, like a Canadian version of Apples in Stereo. “Velveteen” is the prototype: a bright-toned, candy-colored fantasy, as eager to please as a puppy, belying the far more sobering lyrics about lost love and betrayal that accompany it. “Very Online Guy” is a stab at tongue in cheek, about the illusory presentation and ghostly presence of the typical title character, replete with chiming organ and a big drumbeat, as lead singer Molly Rankin insistently warns, at the top end of her range, “He’s only one filter away.” Rankin has a strong voice, but there’s a sour-milk quality to some of her singing on this record, as if she were wary of warbling too prettily. See, in particular, “Pomeranian Spinster” (not sure if the title is anything but free association), which is the busiest song on the record, lots of word salad spilling out at the listener over the course of 200 seconds, carnivalesque without being in any way musical (the attenuated theme has no real development at all). In some respects, “Bored in Bristol” is the best song on the disc because it has an easygoing swing to it, a unique playfulness that summons memories of boardwalks and arcades, even if, as on “Velveteen,” the futility and resignation expressed in the verses do not match the timbre, which is piped through higher-register keyboards than elsewhere. One could also make a case for the “final” song (there is an uncredited fourteenth track, “Fourth Figure,” lasting barely eighty seconds, a sort of moony, drunken waltz bleated by Rankin), “Lottery Noises,” as tops because it has the most piercing refrain, and guitarist Alec O’Hanley reserves his best tricks for the variations that spice it up—really moving and cleverly inventive. Lacking more of these skillful touches,
Blue Rev is little more than a trifle, a collection of bright-hued bagatelles with oddly incongruous lyrics.
B+
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, Time Skiffs (Domino Recordings)—It did not move me initially, but
Time Skiffs, upon repeated listening, is a solid disc. It is a tribute to these four longtime friends from Baltimore (originally) that, into their mid-forties, with some having family responsibilities, some living or having lived abroad, and various solo/collaborative projects either already recorded or in the works, they can still create together at this level, with no evident discord. Guitarist and keyboardist Deakin (Josh Dibb) is back after having sat out a couple of the band’s gradually more infrequent releases,
Merriweather Post Pavilion, which took top honors in my 2009 music survey, and
Painting with (see the 2016 music survey). Some critics complained that
Time Skiffs is not as experimental as previous Animal Collective discs, though the band’s own label, Domino, compared it in its press release to
Strawberry Jam (see the 2007 music survey). It is hardly surprising, given the difficult circumstances of collaborating from afar to record (much of the work took place in the band members’ home studios) amid a pandemic, that the record skews a little more conservative than those of their salad (or fruit) days. I used to describe the band’s sound as the aural equivalent of fingerpainting, but now it is far more limpid and brighter in tone, as mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Heba Kadry. The maturation of the foursome’s compositional outlook shows from the outset. Many of the tunes have a quasi-tropical lilt to them. “Strung with Everything” packs a lot into its seven or so minutes, psychedelia and Beatlesque sound effects, and a loud call-and-response section led by Avey Tare (Dave Portner), but the Caribbean vibe and rhythms suffuse much of the tune. “Car Keys” surfs a wave of triplets and gentle, tight syncopations. “Dragon Slayer,” “Walker,” and “We Go Back” are delightfully gracious
dream pop confections, while “Passer-By” and “Royal and Desire” are languorous, the latter almost louche, following an ethereal instrumental opening. “Passer-By,” by contrast, loses momentum when its rhythm and tenor change abruptly midstream for the chorus. “Walker” was intended as a tribute to the avant-garde British-American songwriter Scott Walker (not to be confused with the hard-right former governor of Wisconsin), who died in 2019, around the time of the song’s conception. Filigreed with xylophone, this swoony number ends with Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) ruminating idly. “Prester John,” named for a mythical Christian king and prelate who is frequently referenced at the margins of maps from the Middle Ages, as dwelling somewhere beyond the furthest horizons, is a melding of two different compositions, one by Panda Bear and the other primarily by Avey Tare. The song actually holds together better melodically than it does in terms of its verse: Panda’s contribution is delicate, wistful, nostalgically casting back to an era when environmental concerns were not quite so apocalyptic as they are now, according to a
Billboard interview; it’s a strange fit with Avey Tare’s chorus of open lamentation, “Prester John is breaking down/His heart is breaking down,” as if the medieval icon had been transmogrified into a symbol of ecological protest. Yet the musical transition is seamless, even bringing back part of the original verse in a truncated round. The piece ends with a minute or so of otherworldly electronic (synth and drums) probes and fades. The song that marks the second of the twin fulcrums of the record (along with “Prester John”) is “Cherokee,” the longest on the disc at nearly eight minutes. Like the members of Animal Collective, I have “spent some time in Cherokee,” a poor, downtrodden, small native American settlement sitting at the eastern entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and not far from where Avey Tare maintains his home studio in Asheville, N.C. Like “Prester John,” this song trades in nostalgia and yearning and closes with a minute-long instrumental fade-out. One could talk for some time about the meaning of the wide-ranging, fantastical lyrics (from infants winning the lottery to Tom Hanks making a cameo), but in essence, the narrator is widely traveled and feels a sense of displacement moving between the poles of a simpler existence (Cherokee, Cullowhee, Black Mountain College, etc.) and the pressing concerns of modernity and cosmopolitan life. Compositionally, the piece is fleet and fugitive—the same synthesizer pulses again and again—but the melody never really flourishes beyond the initial verse expression, a case of arrested development. There is an extended bridge section with a repeating phrase of countermelody, interrupted briefly by a segment from Harry Owens’s “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha,” as performed by Alfred Apaka & His Hawaiians. Again, the whole holds together better than this description might lead one to think. Animal Collective made the best use of the material they could cobble together working under the constraints of remote conferencing; meantime, the band members accumulated a bunch of material that could not be executed in such conditions; now that the pandemic is behind us, I will be eager to be served a course of the leftovers.
A/A-
Sample song “Prester John”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5iJ9wt4paY
ARCADE FIRE, We (Columbia Records)—Over the past two decades, Arcade Fire, having taken command of the hill known as Cultural Relevance, has slowly lost purchase on that summit.
Funeral (2004) was an astounding debut, and I ranked it as the top album of the millennium’s first decade.
Neon Bible (2007) won my album of the year. Both were central to the conversation about current rock, though not everyone was on board even from the start. A somewhat lesser album,
The Suburbs (see the 2010 music survey) came in for a fair amount of critical scorn, though it merited better. The two more recent albums,
Reflektor (see the 2013 music survey) and
Everything Now (see the 2017 music survey), were at best middling. The band still matters enough that the release of
We garnered its share of press coverage, but it seemed absent from anybody’s best-of list for the year. And with good reason. Win Butler, the bandleader and chief creative force, seems to be caught in the kind of trap that Bono Vox and U2 found themselves in following the worldwide impact of
The Unforgettable Fire (1984) and
The Joshua Tree (1987), wondering if monumentality and grand statements about global issues were their unshakeable legacy. Bono and company eventually found a way out; thus far, Butler and Arcade Fire have not. It might explain why Butler’s younger brother, Will, announced that
We would be his last time in studio with the band, though he did not give reasons other than “things change.” Win Butler and his wife and bandmate, Régine Chassagne, have let grandiosity permeate their songwriting. Especially in “End of the Empire,” the album’s centerpiece, the attempt to conflate concerns and anxieties that are deeply personal with larger world-historical issues lands with a thud. On
The Suburbs, this device worked because it was a set of reflections by Win and Will about their experiences growing up in suburban Houston. Here the laments seem neuralgic and too petty and specific to stand next to lines like “where California used to be” and “Virgil said let’s take a ride/You’ll need a divine guide/’cause this inferno’s hyperdrive.” (Occasionally, Butler lands a punch, as with “Your heroes are selling you underwear/And little white pills for your despair.”) Even the vocals are whiny or mincing at times; when Butler contemplates naming a child after the giant black hole Sagittarius A, his “what a pretty name” aside sounds oddly grandmotherly. The album has five song titles but seven tracks; each title except the title track is multipart, yet some parts have their own tracks and others do not. The first part of the single-track “End of the Empire” is slow and largely acoustic, with tonal shades of John Lennon’s “Imagine” (1971); Part Two is processional and choral, more like something from
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Part Three’s melodrama evokes U2 at times, while the fourth and final part reverts to acoustic piano, crabby and rambling but ending on a cosmically hopeful note with a dreamy little flourish that might as well have been lifted straight from the Electric Light Orchestra’s
Out of the Blue (1977).
We actually begins promisingly, as “Age of Anxiety I,” which kicked off the whole
fin de siècle concept of an America crumbling under the stress of the pandemic, stays in its lane in terms of not freighting its nail-chewing angst with some unearned larger significance. It is also, by a long measure, the best song on the disc, propulsive and with a memorably searching piano intro on repeat, intensifying and soaring to new heights following a pause midway. Musically, there are other praiseworthy elements to the record: the skittering swinginess and affectingly percolating beat of “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole),” the band’s exuberance when it lets loose for rollicking Part Two of “The Lightning” following the blandly hollow exhortations of Part One (trying a little too hard for uplift), the stretchy, easygoing pop of “Unconditional II (Race and Religion),” which would not seem out of place on a record by fellow Montrealers Stars. But the words to “Unconditional II” just seem dopey (“I’ll be your race and religion”), and in this and other spots the lyrics resort to clichés: “body and soul,” “high on her supply,” “plastic soul.” Just as Butler’s singing is often too mannered, Chassagne’s vocals, notably in “Unconditional II” where she takes the lead, are weirdly clipped and chirpy, at the top end of her range. Moreover, Peter Gabriel, roped in for the song’s backing vocal, is criminally underutilized. The folk-tinged title track at the record’s end, all acoustic apart from some synth sustained notes, sounds enervated and resigned, making the listener wonder why it bothered to rouse itself from its false ending for just a few more querying measures. The pandemic put all performers in an uncomfortable situation, but in trying to tie in all the associated neuroses with national decline, Arcade Fire really hit a false note with this one.
B DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE, Asphalt Meadows (Atlantic Records)—It is difficult to express just why
Asphalt Meadows seems as barren as its title, but the album did little to move me. The record is well honed and at the same time dull. The music’s character is in some ways comparable to vintage Fountains of Wayne, yet that band was wry and clever in a way that earnest Ben Gibbard and crew never are, and Chris Collingwood and the late Adam Schlesinger were better songwriters than Death Cab for Cutie’s, at least on current form. Perhaps the Bellingham, Washington, band peaked creatively with
Transatlanticism two decades ago, though given the constraints of trying to work through Covid-19, it is hard to say definitively. Gibbard, who also fronts the Postal Service, sings in a soothing tenor, and the songs are comfy like a sweater and understated to a fault, even when trying to amp up the intensity. The lyrics are unusually (for this era of pop music crassness) literary and sublime and are hence the record’s chief selling point. Songs like “Rand McNally,” “Wheat Like Waves,” and “Foxglove through the Clearcut” relate prototypically American stories of restlessness and striving, and—damn—you just wish they were more stirring beyond the words, all static verse (in the case of “Foxglove,” spoken verse) and limp chorus. Part of the problem is that no selection really stands out; the several chosen by the band as singles are peas in a pod with the rest. “Roman Candles” is nothing but electric guitars (four of them!) and voice, rising to an attenuated crescendo of strumming that approximates the sputtering of fireworks while managing not to illuminate, even momentarily, in terms of compositional insight, given its limited range and lack of exposition. “Pepper” has a true chorus, at least, if hardly the most fetching, not something you are likely to want to hum in the shower. The opener, “I Don’t Know How I Survive,” is Gibbard’s own response to the pandemic, according to an interview in Stereogum, though in a stylized, nonspecific way, and that anxiety carries over to “Roman Candles.” “I Don’t Know How to Survive” is distinguished by the textural and dynamic contrast between the solo guitar and massed guitar sections, and by the way it ends quietly with a third stab at the verse portion rather than a phaseout of the refrain. Also displaying a constricted palette, if more kineticism, is “I Miss Strangers,” another response to pandemic shock; the song is the sole representative on the disc with a slowed-down, quieter bridge. The subtlest songwriting happens with the gently swaying, hypnotic “Fragments from the Decade.” More chromaticism graces the harmonics and the chorus of the title track, lending it somewhat more warmth and emotional resonance. The same can be said for the final track, “I’ll Never Give Up on You,” the only one featuring a rolling, pulsing keyboard
ostinato. These touches are not sufficient to elevate either song to the realm of transcendence, but at least they offer respite from cool, cerebral detachment.
Asphalt Meadows is hardly a bad record, but seldom have I seen so minimal a payoff in songcraft from people who are certainly capable of providing more.
B+/B
DRY CLEANING, Stumpwork (4AD)—Very much in the same mold as Dry Cleaning’s debut,
New Long Leg (see the 2021 music survey),
Stumpwork is just too cool for anything as commonplace as melody. Having had a year to get accustomed to the band’s modus operandi, I will devote fewer “column inches” to complaining about it this time round. Still, I cannot help but fantasize about some band making a remix of the album, supplying actual tunes to correspond with the echt-stylish grooves laid down by Dry Cleaning’s own Tom Dowse (lead guitar), Lewis Maynard (bass), and Nick Buxton (percussion). But that would likely obliterate the chief contribution of vocalist (not so much “singer”) Florence Shaw—her droll lyrics, a jumbled selection of bits of interior monologue à la Virginia Woolf externalized. Many of them skewer consumerism (“My shoe organising thing arrived/Thank God”; “I will risk slow death for Chinese spring roll”; “Just don’t touch my gaming mouse you rat”), and others are just outright funny, viz. “Gary Ashby,” about a pet tortoise of that name that escaped during the lockdown. A few songs have at least the rudiments of a tune, with Shaw humming or scatting along. When the guys are “in the zone,” which is most of the time, the songs have a thrumming energy; otherwise, they can seem desultory, as on “Driver’s Story” or “No Decent Shoes for Rain,” or, to a lesser extent, the title track. What “No Decent Shoes for Rain” does have is a crisply clarion bass interlude whose theme carries over into the song’s second half. Certain songs have saxophone as an added color, upgrading the band’s tasteful minimalism to something that can feel just a little louche, moaning, shades of the Psychedelic Furs from four decades ago, as in the engaging opener, “Anna Calls from the Arctic,” even while chugging along. “Hot Penny Day” begins with the odd speculation “If I could live across the road from a boot fair/Wouldn’t that be something.” The music incorporates
wah-wah growling, zoomy synthesizer outbursts, and modal guitar figurations to lend some “international man of mystery” film intrigue to what is really the most pedestrian collection of ruminations. It is the combination of the wah-wah and the Turkish accents—maybe Dowse is picking up cues from Altın Gün or Kit Sebastian (see the 2019 and 2021 music surveys)—that make “Hot Penny Day” particularly fetching. “Kwenchy Kups,” not one of the most memorable tunes, is saved by its own cheery briskness (likewise with “Gary Ashby,” which follows it) and its nonsensical yet at times pointedly profane lyrics. The very busy “Conservative Hell” makes little impact (if you were expecting political commentary, it never extends beyond the title), apart from the clever line “If you think this car’s dirty you should try a night with the driver,” until its improbably dreamy sax-and-guitars instrumental fadeout, which constitutes nearly half the composition. “Liberty Log” is darker in hue than anything else on the disc, and its tonal distortions fractionally more experimental, though the merciless repetition of “It’s a weird premise for a show but I like it” might make the listener want to bang his or her head against the wall. When the bass kicks in, though, it is gratifyingly hip reminder that, for all the tremulous sustained tones and note-bending, this is still rock’n’roll. Only slightly less obsidian is the final piece, “Icebergs”: a bit sillier, a moody cartoon that devolves into a harmonically pleasing if clangorous guitar chorus accompanied by incongruous whistles the first time around and hooty overtones the second, punctuated by a touch of baritone sax at the fading away. I do wonder how long Dry Cleaning can keep this formula fresh, but through two records, the band is succeeding. If I am giving
Stumpwork a higher grade than its predecessor, it is not necessarily because it is a better record but I have calibrated my expectations—that and, in certain ways, the newer record is slyly more musically ambitious, despite certain songs merely punching the clock.
A- DUNGEN, En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog (Mexican Summer)—If you rearrange a few letters in “Dungen” and add a couple of Rs, you get “Rundgren.” Such wordplay can be silly, yet the influence of the pioneering rocker/producer Todd Rundgren on this record is undeniable. It comes through most clearly on “Höstens Färger” (The Colors of Autumn), with its limpid piano, its swoony, keening guitar, and its choruses bathed in a warm nostalgia for “I Saw the Light” (1972). On Bandcamp,
En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog (One Is Too Much and a Thousand Is Never Enough) was described as Dungen’s most and least psychedelic record at the same time, in the sense that it steers clear of the tropes while honoring the spirit of the movement. Psychedelia is not the only wellspring from which the album, Dungen’s first full-length studio effort since
Allas Sak (see the 2015 music survey), draws. Bandleader and singer Gustav Ejstes has been inspired by turns by jazz, progressive rock, metal. The opener, “Skövde,” named after a small city in south central Sweden, is a breezy guitar piece (its theme doubled by piano) with light syncopations and flute filigree, becoming more “Rundgrenesque” at the chorus. Ejstes’s tenor has never been a favorite of mine, a bit pinched, too Al Stewart–like (“The Year of the Cat”) for my taste, but its mellow tone suits the music. As brisk as “Skövde,” if somehow both less tuneful and excessively mellifluous, is the first song on the B-side, “Var Har Du Varit?” (Where Have You Been?), which scores only with the chromatic chord changes that precede the thematic recapitulation. The vocal section of “Möbler” (Furniture) is ingratiatingly smooth Euro-pap, but the piece before long moves on to a lengthy, spacy, progressive instrumental coda that might as well be a different track altogether, lots of tremulous synth spiked by power guitar outbursts and humming feedback. The album really gets a jolt of voltage with “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus” (The Night’s Last Streak of Light), powered by a big drumbeat, glam, skittering electric guitar arpeggiations, buzzy tones, dire vocals, and wailing bass; its unexpected chord changes at intervals show that the light is indeed still glimmering. The other big winner is “Klockan Slår Den Är Mycket Nu” (The Clock Strikes; It’s Late Now), a medley of sorts that returns several times to the opening motif, a jazzy, slightly moody little tune set to a ticking beat. This is interrupted first by a straightforward, Supertramp-ish piano theme, later by a slower, chiming electronic passage out of Moody Blues territory, and finally terminated by some sound effects worthy of Steve Hackett (a series of gurgling tones, an answering machine beep), which leads to yet another broad keyboard theme. As the composition ends, a man’s voice is heard speaking above the keys, and this carries over to the title track, a piano interlude that is by far the shortest on the record, at barely a minute. This brief fantasia is glowing yet also bittersweet, and would have benefited from further exploration and development. The final song, “Om Natten” (About the Night), is very much in tune with “Klockan Slår Den Är Mycket Nu,” likewise driven by a metronome and so thematically similar as almost to serve as a reprise. Even so, it is slower and more somber and lachrymose, with the piano and synths reiterating the sung melody. Eventually, the sky lifts and we get a more distant perspective, starry and dreamy, embroidered by a canopy of flute, piano, and synthesizer, whose cyclic runs become faster and more insistent toward the close. Rundgren had nothing to do with the production of this album and probably knows no Swedish (nor do I), but I am confident that he would be proud of it and even touched by the homage.
A-
FKA TWIGS, Caprisongs (Young Recordings/ Atlantic Records)—Calling an album a “mixtape” does not really distinguish it from any other recording that includes invited guests or multiple producers.
Caprisongs is, however, a departure from the previous work of FKA Twigs (Tahliah Debrett Barnett), somewhat to its disadvantage. Each of her previous full-length recordings (see the 2014 and 2019 music surveys) was exquisite in its own way and earned an A grade in this record roundup. The current disc has her and her costars exploring various genres that have particular relevance to African or Caribbean communities in the United Kingdom. These range from hip-hop to dancehall to Afrobeat and beyond. Many of the seventeen tracks (several are mere interludes) are substantially inferior to the more experimental material from
LP1 or
Magdalene. Even so, Twigs’s virtues remain, most notably, the versatile instrument that is her voice, with an impressive range. Few pop singers today can pull off what she does with her silvery, ultra-high soprano register. As well, although I am not always certain whether to credit her or her producers, there are nice touches even in songs I dislike, such as the divine, ethereal choir supplying a backing track for “Honda,” featuring the rapper Pa Salieu (Pa Salieu Gaye). A number of tracks are soulful about life in the big city without standing out from the reams of neo-soul and R&B being published every year by record companies. And the sampled patter between songs is full of cliché and life-affirming platitudes, with dopey comments and what can sound like inside jokes sprinkled in. In this way, FKA Twigs’s “mixtape” is closer to what Dev Hynes puts out from time to time as Blood Orange (see the 2013, 2016, and 2018 music surveys), except that Blood Orange deploys Hynes’s own compositional skills in seductive ways. Here the pick of the crop is “Papi Bones,” welcoming in Shygirl (Blane Muise), but not on account of the featured artist’s muted contributions. Rather, it is the booming dancehall groove and trumpet accents that make it smolder. Also earning plaudits are the dreamy, drowsy “Meta Angel,” which intersperses Twigs’s natural and Auto-Tuned voices, and “Darjeeling,” a
grime number with harp filigree that name-checks numerous South London locales in the voicing of Jorja Smith and Unknown T (Daniel Lena) while basing itself on Olive’s “You’re Not Alone” (1996). More oily-slick, lachrymose, and with cringey,
anime-styled cartoonish vocals, is the album’s lead single, “Tears in the Club,” teaming up with the Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) and with Arca (Alejandra Ghersi) as one of its producers. “Pamplemousse” is a brief dose of tremulous and hyperactive pop-R&B on helium “Jealousy” underplays its Afrobeat elements, while showcasing the buttery, bleating vocals of Nigeria’s Rema (Divine Ikubor). Commenters have remarked on the Janet Jackson–esque vocal mannerisms the singer displays in the opener, “Ride the Dragon,” which are set against some grotesquely distorted male vocals (other tracks such as “Lightbeamers” employ Burial [William Bevan]–style vocal manipulations as well), like something out of
Doctor Who. The closing track, “Thank You Song,” is all Twigs (production by Arca) and is one of her lamer efforts, a squishy, motionless Hallmark card of a tune. The strange combination of laid-back moodiness and in-your-face nyeah-nyeah-ing of “Oh My Love” and the limp, soggy “Careless” (featuring Daniel Caesar) also do little for me. It might be unfair to have drawn comparisons with her earlier output since the intentions are clearly different here, and the sublime delicacy and vulnerability inherent in her performance survives even the push for a broader audience—but there, I did it anyway. This might be an intriguing one-off for Twigs; I would lament if it represented a more permanent change in direction. Note: I have tried to review this as objectively as possible. Nevertheless, I doubt I will be spotlighting FKA Twigs in the future since Barnett aligned herself with the so-called Musicians for Palestine movement. Refusing to perform in Israel is a form of anti-Semitism; something I cannot abide or endorse.
B+
GOAT, Oh Death (Rocket Recordings)—Six years passed from the issuance of
Requiem (see the 2016 music survey) to that of
Oh Death, but the titular themes are nearly identical and the music likewise is little changed over that span. Thus, the things that irritated me on earlier Goatdiscs, primarily the shouty nature of the female vocalist but also a certain hootiness, are still very much part of the fabric. (The hooty routine is evinced here on the short instrumental “Apegoat,” a chimera no one would ever want to see, which sounds as if performed on a saxophone mouthpiece, like a fly you want to swat but with the decibel level amped by three orders of magnitude.) Even so,
Oh Death gets a higher mark than
Requiem because, in this instance, less is more. It may be the destiny of this still anonymous hippie collective, allegedly from northern Sweden (though Gothenburg based), to evolve into an Antibalas-type world music jam band with similar progressive leanings, but the songs on
Oh Death are tight and focused, in contrast to the bloat of its predecessor. For those who find the singer as wearisome as I do, some relief comes at the end of the disc, as her voice is barely heard on “Remind Yourself,” and the final two pieces are purely instrumental. “Remind Yourself” begins with a narrative delivered in a distorted basso voice, reminiscent of that used to relate an Eduardo Galeano story on “Wild Blue,” from Dave Douglas’s jazz record
Freak In (2003), then is propelled by a repeating bass groove with woodblock and other percussion, upon which is built an impressively yowling guitar improvisation. This leads directly into “Blessings,” a minute-long pendant that starts by translating that bass sequence to the lower piano keys and wanders into various flourishes from there, on an instrument full of reverb that sounds slightly tinny, like a saloon piano. “Passes Like Clouds,” the closer, is the most abstract and open-ended jam, stretching for just over five minutes on an album that barely surpasses the 33-minute mark. The title might be philosophical; the music is largely but not entirely a meal of empty calories, ruminative yet wispy. “Goatmilk” begins with a platitudinous invocation before launching its
wah-wah groove, which is très cool despite the vocalist straining her limited range over the lyrics more than anywhere else, with the possible exception of “Chukua Pesa.” With its horn charts taking over the song following the flutes and recorders, this is the most Antibalas-like composition on the disc. Whereas its successor, “Blow the Horns,” has no horn section but a repeating guitar figuration that recalls the “desert blues” of Tinariwen, though this dissolves into an acidic haze by song’s end. The stronger offerings are among the first four on the record. “Do the Dance” is insistently percussive and not terribly melodic, yet it is redeemed by the inventively resonant piano/synthesizer harmonies that follow the chorus. As “world musicky” as they come, “Chukua Pesa” begins with tabla and other drums, then sitar-like strings and fuzz and reverb accompany another screechy, wound-up-tight vocal tune whose agitated, Middle Eastern/South Asian–flavored melody even an accomplished singer would struggle with. The opener, “Soon You Die,” kicks off with a short dirge set to a heartbeat, which is quickly succeeded by a wickedly psychedelic and funky, scowling guitar theme. The melody yelled over it is hardly its match in sophistication, but one could safely neglect it and just absorb the electricity of the steel strings. Choice track on the album is “Under No Nation,” a cleverly executed, conscious throwback to classic seventies funk, with Ohio Players–style guitar licks (one could just about sing “Love Rollercoaster” along to one passage) and
güiro-like scraper percussion. As if in tribute to James Chance and the Contortions, it concludes with a raucously wild, wailing/squealing sax over a devilish bass hum. While hardly the Greatest of All Time, Goat’s
Oh Death cocks a snook at the grim reaper, boogie-ing energetically (if with hellish vocals) and entertainingly onto the next plane of existence.
A-
ILE, Nacarile (Sony Music Latin)—The peculiarly named
Nacarile was one of the mild disappointments of the year, given the attendant expectations. This record was on lots of end-of-year best of 2022 lists, and I was already well acquainted with Ileana Cabra Joglar, now styling herself as iLe, having seen her perform live with her older brothers in Calle 13 in Brooklyn a number of years back. Her voice was one of the group’s greatest strengths.
Nacarile is not a poor effort by any means but is uneven in quality, and softer and more focused on romance than I was prepared for. That it is not as politically oriented as the commentary surrounding it implies is probably a good thing; for me, what doomed Calle 13 was its insufferable stridency. One does have to wonder, though, if iLe and her writing partner/producer Ismael Cancel are pulling their punches. Yes, “Donde Nadie Más Respira” (Where No One Can Breathe Anymore) seems to poke a stick at repressive governments and populations that conform rather than resist, and “Algo Bonito” (Something Pretty) has something to say about how women’s rights are trivialized around the world. These are couched in language that is admirably metaphorical and nonspecific. The best songs on the disc are those that sound the most traditional, led by “En Cantos” (In Songs; though this is also a play on words to mean “enchantments”), for which iLe is paired with the Chilean-Mexican Natalia Lafourcade (see the 2009 and 2017 music surveys) in a charming duet, set against a backdrop of humming following the lines of a common Latin Caribbean chord progression, with synthesized percussion to replicate a typical
batería. “Traguito” (Gulp) is a heart-rending ballad of a hard life for which alcohol provides temporary relief, led by another Chilean-Mexican singer, Mon Laferte, backed by iLe and Karen Joglar de Gracia (a cousin?), with Spanish guitar accompaniment. On the positive side of the ledger as well is “Algo Bonito,” sporting a big drumbeat and tight syncopations to accompany its boisterous protest theme, although the stentorian rapping of
reggaetonera Ivy Queen that forms the song’s central section leaves me cold. The quasi-countertenor of Rodrigo Cuevas, a Spanish (Asturian) singer, in “Cuando Te Miro” (When I Look at You), is an odd and unexpected touch, in a subdued, opaque number that fails to generate much heat. You might anticipate something very different from a collaboration with Flor de Toloache, New York City’s all-female mariachi troupe, yet the opening song, “A la Deriva” (Adrift), is peculiarly spectral and atonal, with muted percussion toward the close and no trumpet, violin, or guitars at all (just synthesizer)—not bad, just tenebrous and otherworldly. That ethereal tone carries over into the start of “Ningún Lugar” (No Place) but is soon ruined by the hip-hop stylings of Trueno (Mateo Palacios Corazzina), an Argentine rapper. The other five tracks on the album are iLe solos. “Donde Nadie Más Respira” with an underlying current of short, shallow, rapid breaths as the “beat” and violin tremolos to add a note of foreboding, is gravely narrative, given its subject matter, without going overboard. Equally serene, if not particularly memorable, with a dark Latin groove, is “(Escapándome) de Mí” (Escaping Myself). Aside from some nice harmonic chromaticism in “Lo que Yo Quería” (What I Wanted) and a Supertramp-ish organ intro to the final piece, “No Es Importante” (It’s Not Important), the rest is less than remarkable. Following this qualified success, we are left to speculate as to whether iLe’s career will take her to being a singer of quiet ballads in the way that Lafourcade was after leaving the rock band she fronted years ago, or whether she returns to punchier material, in the spirit of her brothers (or of Laferte, for that matter).
B+
JOCKSTRAP, I Love You Jennifer B (Rough Trade Records)—What we have in
I Love You Jennifer B is a London duo, Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye, seemingly determined not to be confined by any bounds of genre. This album, their first full-length effort, is a collection of songs they wrote over a three-year period after graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, sort of the U.K. equivalent of Boston’s Berklee College of Music as an incubator of creative talent. According to the pair, “Everything on it is pretty singular sounding so we hope there is a track there for everyone and something that speaks to you and says, ‘I’m a banger.’” The inevitable downside is that, unless one has truly catholic tastes or no critical faculties whatsoever, not everything is likely to appeal to any given listener. Even so, this is an impressive debut, and I am finding elements to appreciate even in the songs that strike me as more dud than diamond. Jockstrap (the name must be an inside joke) fares best when its focus does not waver; interestingly, that is not the case in the either of the two lead singles, “Concrete over Water” or “Glasgow.” The band members have admitted that even they do not always understand what is going on in their music, and the result sometimes reads like an unintentional mashup; perhaps that is the intent. “Concrete over Water” flips abruptly between two modes: an ethereal, “Somewhere over the Rainbow”–style
dream pop voiced by Ellery and set to simple orchestral accompaniment (all but three of the second-half tracks have orchestral accompaniment, mostly fellow Guildhall students and alums, from what I can tell; the credits and packaging are far too minimalist) and a much busier swarm of cycling synthesizer set against plaintive harmonics (classic British sonority) and punctuated by what sounds like dogs barking to conclude each phrase. Ellery’s voice is supple and flexible but more affecting in her upper registers than when her singing more closely approaches normal speech. More of a magpie’s breakfast, “Glasgow” filches the line “I touch myself” from the song of that title by the Divinyls (1990) and the chiming effects from the famed
Abbey Road medley (1969). Starting out as Ellery’s exclamatory voice backed by harp glissandos, it eventually moves into guitar-driven folk, a sort of Fairport Convention redux, while retaining the sugary/dreamy opening segment as countermelody. Neither of these tracks is bad, nor, on the other hand, do they coalesce into something with real power to move their audience. The two least effective tracks are quiet ones: “What’s It All About?” falls short as a sort of updated response to Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Alfie” (1966), whereas “Angst” contains Ellery’s weakest vocals on the disc (more voice set to harp, which is jarring when the idle vulgarities kick in) combined with limp and wayward composition. “Debra” is a more intriguing creature, its minute-long intro of booming, shiphorn-like tones reminiscent of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark circa
Dazzle Ships (1983) and searching vocals giving way to something entirely different, a throbbing beat, chatty singing, a throwback to 1980s new wave pop, and Orientalism that takes inspiration from both George Harrison and the more recent popularization of
bhangra. Part Renaissance lay, part modernist
psych folk, “Lancaster Court” in its quiet, disturbingly chilly way will insinuate itself into the threads of your consciousness, and perhaps unconsciousness as well. The opener, “Neon,” starts sparely, just voice and a bit of guitar, but does not remain there, quickly shifting into psychedelic territory with shades of
trip-hop, shifting into an affectingly plangent chorus. “Jennifer B” is more electronic from the start, almost computer generated, with distortions and weird vocal interjections, and yet it centers another incongruously dreamy, syrupy vocal—somehow it holds together as a worthwhile follow-on to “Neon.” It is kind of funny that the album’s third single is called “Greatest Hits.” Structurally one of the simplest songs, it winningly channels the British R&B of recent times, say, Adele or Leona Lewis, while casting back even further, with its soul grounded in the 1970s. The final number, “50/50,” is a departure even for this record, unadulterated electronic dance music, playful and grooving, if not particularly catchy. Its disparate parts, vocal and electronic, cohere more firmly than they have any right to, making “50/50” the “banger” to which the duo were aspiring.
I Love You Jennifer B might be all over the map, but if that map contains a variety of beguiling features or fruitful detours, then getting lost is well worth the distraction.
A-
JUST MUSTARD, Heart Under (Partisan Records/Knitting Factory Records)—This brand of mustard comes in just one variety: dark. And it is best when not spread on too thickly. The second LP by Just Mustard, a fivesome from Dundalk, Ireland, succeeds in maintaining a uniform ambience throughout, one that is anything but upbeat. The first band that sprang to mind as a logical comparator was Portishead, a prime exponent of
trip-hop. Although Just Mustard’s debut dabbled in trip-hop, it is absent from the current record, which is more oriented toward
shoegaze and
industrial music. But Portishead was a generational talent from its first recording—intense, fascinating, and tightly wound—whereas Just Mustard is still feeling its way toward maturity. Other acts that could be seen as influences or progenitors include Joy Division and even the xx, groups whose vision was ever downcast. Just Mustard is at its best, despite its postpunk, quasi-minimalist tendencies, when the most is going on with the music. Hence, the first two cuts, “23” and “Still,” are head and shoulders above the rest. The mournful opener, the significance of whose title is unknown, goes on in its droopy, remorseful way a bit too much about “I would have cherished/I should have cherished,” but the powerful underlying drone reinforces the song’s pathos. “Still” is better yet, its clangorous bass, keening guitars, and quick-strobing, unconventional, “sawing” percussion perfectly accompanying Katie Ball’s dire vocal. While Ball sometimes has problems staying on pitch, her voice is otherwise well suited to this genre, and “Still” is one of the few songs in which it is not engineered to sound as if coming from the bottom of a well. Lyrics are as spare as the often one-word song titles, and are never terribly illuminating, sketching impressions of moods rather than telling stories or engaging in true description or exposition. Other tracks have their moments, particularly “Seed,” with its juddering bass line and vocal rising to unaccustomed alacrity, and the crepuscular and unsettlingly claustrophobic “In Shade,” buffeted by clattering percussion. “Blue Chalk” features reverb and scratchy distortion, machine-gun percussion, and an unusually shapely sung lamentation. “Early” and “Sore” also sport effectively grinding and rueful guitar ensemble work to match the anguish and resignation in Ball’s singing. Each of these stays too close to its home base, in terms of thematic expression and reiteration, for its own benefit. In songs such as “I Am You” or “Mirrors,” even more so, there just is not enough play around the introductory theme to keep the listener engaged; it is at times like these when the record’s forty-five minutes seem too long. If atmospherics sufficed to make an album great,
Heart Under would take home multiple prizes, but even this stripped-down style calls out for more compositional care and activity than is on display here.
B+
THE MARS VOLTA, The Mars Volta (Clouds Hill)—The first album in a decade from the duo of Omar Rodríguez-López (ORL) and Cedric Bixler-Zavala (CBZ) marks a departure for the group, which broke apart following the release of
Noctourniquet, the winner of won my Album of the Year for 2012. Gone are the lengthy fantasies that are core to the progressive rock mission, replaced by fourteen short, more pop-oriented songs. This produces conflicting feelings in me, a prog rock fan from way back. The division of labor has ORL doing most of the composition, with CBZ layering on the vocal melodies. I would be remiss if I did not point out the contributions of other band members: Eva Gardner on bass, Marcel Rodríguez-López (Omar’s brother) and Willy Rodriguez-Quiñones on drums, and Leo Genovese on piano. While neither ORL nor CBZ is a natural tunesmith in the vein of the late Gerry Goffin or Max Martin, they do have a certain knack for more conventional styles of songwriting. The results here are knotty and display more heft than elegance because that is in the pair’s musical DNA, but they are still capable of impressive lyricism when it suits them. I do wish that Bixler-Zavala had correspondingly lightened up the verbiage. His sometimes baffling flights of fancy (“truancy of wasps,” “catatonic walls,” “Just let me go/And have this mutiny”)—does he even think about whether they make sense?—are far better suited to the supernatural tales and musings of progressive music than to more down-to-earth genres. CBZ is exorcising the ghosts of his misadventures with Scientology, which are part of the reason the pair split up in 2013, but one might be hard-pressed to guess that from the lyrics without knowing in advance. There is not a huge variation in quality across the tracklist, yet I would venture to say that the Mars Volta frontloaded the best material, particularly the first two songs, “Blacklight Shine” and “Graveyard Love,” and the fifth, “Vigil.” Latin rhythms find their way into some of the music, and adding to the richness of “Blacklight Shine” is the influence of Santana’s acid rock, heard in the bass line, and the easy switching back and forth between Spanish and English verses. The song is unmistakably the Mars Volta, but with an unaccustomed bounce in its step, propelled by active percussion, sultry and hinting at intrigue. It runs directly into “Graveyard Love,” which is more plaintive and quietly searing, though its coiled tension is sprung eventually into rat-a-tat drumming with bass inflections and bursts of synthesizer. Following two more contemplative numbers, “Shore Story” and “Blank Condolences,” “Vigil” ambles through a gentle, winningly sunny chorus that evokes the early years of bands such as the Bee Gees or Supertramp. Other highlights include “Equus,” whose sinister verse section unfolds into a falsetto lamentation in the chorus, “Pain in my heart go away/It never stops,” while the underlying keyboards display subtle chromatic shifts on the refrain’s reiteration, and “The Requisition,” which closes out the disc. “The Requisition” is a chimera, beginning warmly (notwithstanding the lyric “tribute of carrion piled at the door”) and mildly, then adding a dash of suspense and countermelodic agitation, cycling back one more time between the two modes, with the latter steadily intensifying as the vocal breaks into fragments and adds strata of urgency until, near the bursting point, the song (and album) abruptly ends. The most overtly “Latin” composition is “Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazón” (May God Curse You, My Heart), which is also the title of the acoustic version of this album the band put out in 2023. One of the shortest pieces, “Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazón” borrows from Cuban genres like
son and
charanga, as reflected in shades of black through a funhouse mirror. The album’s momentum flags after this, even if there are still some nice touches such as the bass clarinet and flute accents in “Palm Full of Crux” and the folk lay character of “Tourmaline,” then it picks up again for the final three numbers. In the final analysis, perhaps this collection of tunes is not so far removed from the Mars Volta’s earlier experimentation—still dense and intricate, just shorter and more self-contained. But I miss the catharsis that accompanied the earlier records’ fraught voyages.
A-/B+ MATMOS, Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer (Thrill Jockey Records)—Had he lived this long, John Cage would have had a field day with this record. Matmos, the duo of Martin (M. C.) Schmidt and Drew Daniel, have been coming up with new and diverse concepts for albums just about annually. According to the CD’s back cover, “This album interpolates, edits and manipulates music originally made by Bogusław Schaeffer.” Schaeffer was a Polish composer, musicologist, playwright, dramaturg, and graphic artist and member of the second “Cracow Group” of composers in the 1950s and onward, along with Krzysztof Penderecki, Andrzej Panufnik, and others. He died in 2019, so this record is an in memoriam tribute. In approaching the disc, I thought initially that having something intelligent to say about it presupposes a knowledge of this avant-garde composer that I simply do not possess. But Matmos is not presenting his music straight up; rather, the Baltimore-based duo are splicing various pieces into fragments and reassembling them, through studio processing and editing, with added instrumentation (Schmidt himself plays bass guitar and synthesizer) in some places, into something that is very “Matmos”-y. The cover notes specify that many of the Schaeffer works used were “created originally for the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in the 1960s and 1970s. The sources are: [the opera]
Monodram, Heraklitiana, Theme: Electronic Music, Music for Tape, E. S. Jazz [is this a misprint? should be “B. S. Jazz”?], Symphony: Electronic Music, Missa Elettronica, Project, Antiphona, Assemblage I and Assemblage II.” It was also useful to consult the album description on Bandcamp, without which I would never have noticed, for example, that the weird titles given to the second, third, and fourth compositions, “Cobra Wages Shuffle,” “Few, Far Chaos Bugles,” and “Flashcube Fog Wares,” are all anagrams of the composer’s full name. Quoting from that analysis by an unnamed critic: “the resulting arrangements constantly toy with scale as they move from the close-mic-ing of ASMR and the intimacy of chamber music to the immensity of processed drones and oceanic field-recordings that close the album.” In the course of the eight tracks, one might well imagine hearing bits of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” (1968), especially in the sampling-heavy “Flashcube Fog Wares,” Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s electronic experimentation
No Pussyfooting (1973), Was Not Was (clattering sampled percussion), Kate Bush’s “Hello Earth” (1985; the low growls), Genesis (the “heavenly choirs”). The first half of the album consists of shorter (the final three tracks take up half the record) and generally more playful offerings; the second half is longer-form and more intangible. The final selection, “Anti-Antiphon (Absolute Decomposition),” is the least engaging; I found my mind wandering during multiple listens. “Resemblage,” the tick-tock, beepy opener, is the only composition to incorporate an actual tune. Both “Cobra Wages Shuffle,” percolating and at the same time ethereal, and “Tonight There Is Something Special about the Moon” end with a woman speaking Polish, much more extensively on the latter. Also, midway through “Tonight There Is Something Special about the Moon,” there is a passage with a drumbeat and “horns,” like a processional from a space-age operetta (
Star Trek, anyone? The Klingon opera
Aktuh and Melota?). This is immediately preceded by a passage that recalls the “Neptune” movement from Gustav Holst’s
The Planets. The “song” has an additional producer in fellow Baltimorean Max Eilbacher of Horse Lords (see below, in the Miscellaneous section). “Few, Far Chaos Bugles,” beginning with pulsations and a hint of hunting horns, has a tiny interval of viola and
erhu, played by Ulas Kurugullu, while the spectrally haunting “If All Things Were Turned to Smoke” features the harp of Úna Monaghan. Those not drawn to electronic or experimental music will likely find this album gimmicky, but year after year, Schmidt and Daniel manage to explore yet another little-known nook in the world of sound and make it into their own, weirdly lovely brand of abstract music.
A
METRIC, Formentera (Metric Music International/ Thirty Tigers)—Named for the Balearic island that has had a reputation as a hippie haven for more than half a century, Metric’s first album since
Art of Doubt won Album of the Year honors (see the 2018 music survey) is a slow burn pretty much all the way through. The kicker is its opening song, “Doomscroller.” In spite of not having a particularly lyrical or original melodic refrain, not to mention a nervously monotone verse section, spit out rapid-fire style by lead singer Emily Haines, “Doomscroller” packs a punch because it comes at you relentlessly, even as it changes stripes repeatedly. Even more so, however, because it manages to capture the zeitgeist, as people’s anxieties mount about climate change and natural disasters, mass shootings, terrorist slaughters, coups, racial and ethnic tensions, and culture wars. Apart from a single mention of QAnon, the lyrics are nonspecific. Haines’s white-knuckled enumeration of the potential horrors stalking her via her electronic device yields to a battery of guitar attacks—basically playing off a single chord change—which abruptly subside to a slow, solo piano portion by Haines, any harbor in a storm. This manic cycle repeats until the song evolves into a power ballad of reassurance, which the singer delivers as deftly as the jittery stuff at the beginning. All this over the course of ten and half minutes might leave you breathless, but there is more, naturally. Nothing as intense, but the band, after quiet openings, channels its customary power in the two songs that follow: “All Comes Crashing” (another ominous one whose theme is essentially, “if the world’s going to hell, there is no one I would rather spend the last night with than you”) and “What Feels Like Eternity,” an (also fairly monochrome) uptempo rock swinger with tightly syncopated patterns. The title track is softer, if no less plaintive, with mournful synth overtones, as it contemplates escapism to an island paradise, another form of refuge from the incessant drumbeat of bad news. The orchestral intro and outro, supplied by the Budapest Art Orchestra, is very Moody Blues-ish. If the record becomes flaccid at some point, it is with the strangely titled “Enemies of the Ocean,” which also threads strings from the same Hungarian orchestra into the mix—not a misfire so much as overstuffed with mismatched sections, a drag on the record’s momentum. The drop in energy lasts partway through “I Will Never Settle,” before that song rouses itself in stages and catches fire, wrapping up with the singsong motto “We will never settle; it would crush our souls.” “False Dichotomy” and “Oh Please” are also smart, well-constructed shorter tunes that provide some textural contrast with each other and with the rest of the record, while still offering plenty of guitar wattage. The album ends with the U2-esque romantic/heroic fantasy “Paths in the Sky.” Metric has proved with
Formentera that it can move with the times, even as its basic template remains in place, and, at nearly age fifty, Emily Haines shows once more that she is one of rock’s leading frontwomen. There is already a volume two of this record, out in 2023.
A/A-
MITSKI, Laurel Hell (Dead Oceans)—Although she has garnered plenty of critical attention and praise over less than a decade of making music professionally (she was still just 31 when the new record dropped), I found it hard to gin up much enthusiasm for Mitski’s latest. Too much of
Laurel Hell is mannered, blank, inert. Perhaps one reason it misses the mark is that Mitski (Mitski Miyawaki, born Mitsuki Laycock) reconceived it multiple times before settling on its format, a sort of electro-folk/Americana. According to a piece by Andrea Cleary in the
Irish Times, it was first envisioned as a punk record, then a country one, before settling on more mainstream pop. On songs that have more layers of sound, arrangements seem dowdy, even a little cheesy (viz. the brief bridge section of the final song, “That’s Our Lamp”). (Even the
Irish Times review, generally fulsome in its praise, described Mitski’s piano accompaniment as “maudlin.”) Younger generations might glom onto her deeply personal songwriting, but her lyrics are more puzzling than penetrating or poetic. Easily the best track on
Laurel Hell is “Working for the Knife,” its baffling title aside (to say nothing of the album’s title, whose imagery comes from the Appalachian wandering experience of getting tangled in thickets of laurel bushes). The song derives its strength from its undulating, chromatically shifting melody, an ingenious exercise in gentle tugging at the heartstrings, which accentuates the lyric’s painful litany of disappointment and resignation—perhaps a little self-indulgent but reflective of a pitiless world that often seems to care nothing for what we can offer. Taking second prize is the follow-up to “Working for the Knife,” the bouncier “Stay Soft.” Lamenting the way in which opening up one’s heart and showing vulnerability can lead to getting burned repeatedly, its plaintive chorus offers a winning if bittersweet resolution to go on because, as Samuel Beckett observed, what other choice is there? “The Only Heartbreaker,” another of the record’s singles, is upbeat but hollow at its core—not anything you would ever bother trying to hum as you go about your day. The song that succeeds it, “Love Me More,” unabashedly romantic, is much catchier but is hardly the artist at her best, managing to be both generic and mildly cloying. Of a similar nature, manufactured to be dance pop, is “Should’ve Been Me,” boppy but less than bracing or resonant, its best feature the antique, saloon-style piano playing accompanying its chorus. The pulsing “Everyone” is too static for its own good, barely developing at all, even if Mitski displays some deft harmonic touches toward the end. The nearly momentum-less “Valentine, Texas” and “There’s Nothing Left for You” likewise are too slight and unvarying to make much of an imprint. “Heat Lightning” is more raw and soulful, like a War on Drugs song transposed for a female voice. A departure in timbre, “I Guess,” the shortest piece on an album full of short takes, is spectral and full of reverb, but again too mired in its tracks—it is all exposition—to have the haunting effect it aims for. Given the buzz surrounding Mitski after her first couple of records, I expected more from
Laurel Hell, its polish and sophistication notwithstanding, than it actually delivered.
B+/B
PANDA BEAR/SONIC BOOM, Reset (Domino Recording Co.)—One of the year’s fluffier releases,
Reset is a dopamine drip administered steadily through the ears into the listener’s brain. While the album is not pitched toward children, it has a kindergarten-friendly quality, with simple song structures and one major chord following another. Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), as a follow-up to
Buoys (2019), which I did not review, has issued his first joint venture not involving one or more of his Animal Collective bandmates; instead, he is working alongside Sonic Boom (Peter Kember, onetime singer/instrumentalist of Spacemen 3). Since both men sing, play instruments, and produce, it truly is a collaborative effort, even if one has the notion that the record primarily reflects Panda’s sensibility. The uninflected cheeriness gets dull pretty quickly. In several consecutive songs in the middle of the album, Bear and Boom describe distressing situations (“Stuck up on a branch and I can’t get down”; “Whirlpool’s pulling me deeper and down/Fallin’ so deep/Yes I’m gonna drown”; “Danger/When your grip gets a hold a me”) with all the emotion of an auditor going through a company’s books, as if viewing these predicaments from one hundred miles up in space. Meanwhile, the album’s primary conceit—five of its nine tracks are built on loops sampled from 1950s and 1960s pop songs—can pass practically without notice, with one exception: “Livin’ in the After,” the penultimate track, borrows the understated yet romantically Spanish-inflected acoustic guitar accompaniment from Doc Pomus and Mort Shulman’s “Save the Last Dance for Me,” written for the Drifters to perform in 1960. It then expands the instrumentation into a full-blown Mexican fiesta as might have been scored for a forgotten sixties movie. Despite the sonic richness of the arrangements, “Livin’ in the After,” in its detached philosophical stance toward how to conduct one’s life, falls well short of its progenitor’s relatable immediacy and ability to grab hold of something in the listener’s soul. And that is the best of what the pair serve up. The record’s opener, “Gettin’ to the Point,” likewise lifts the acoustic guitar line from Eddie Cochran’s (written together with his brother Bob) “Three Steps to Heaven” (also 1960), and “Danger” does the same with Boudleaux and Felice Bryant’s “Love of My Life,” performed by the Everly Brothers (1958). “Go On” samples the first two chords of the Troggs’ “Give It to Me (All Your Love)” from 1967, written by Reg Presley, and, incongruously, incorporates the song’s title (although not its vocals). “Edge of the Edge,” the most briskly successful synthesis of old and new composition aside from “Livin’ in the After,” snatches the
doo-wop backing chorus and handclaps of Randy & the Rainbows’ “Denise” (1963), penned by Neil Mel Levenson. All of this crate-digging is in the service of what, precisely? The tunes spun by Panda and Sonic Boom off this scaffolding are sunny, with a few interesting tricks in sound effects, such as a high-pitched squeal/whistle one could imagine being emitted by a bottlenose dolphin. With its tonal uniformity unchecked by any shadings,
Reset lacks not only sophistication of song structure but emotional depth of any kind. “Danger” is the closest approach any of these tunes makes to plaintiveness, yet is more play-acting than sincerely felt. And the remaining 44 percent of the disc, without even the latticework of these rhythms and harmonies developed by others, sags from its own inertia. For “Whirlpool,” for example, the arrangements are appropriately eddying and bubbly, but the song’s utter lack of affect and its repetitiveness make me pine for the craftsmanship of Animal Collective. Songs such as “Everyday” and “Everything’s Been Leading to This” might as well have been written by artificial intelligence. Given Panda Bear’s impressive opus, including
Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (see the 2015 music survey), I was naturally expecting far more from this pooling of talents; instead, what we have pales in comparison to Panda’s work with Animal Collective issued the very same year (see above).
B-
ADRIAN QUESADA, Adrian Quesada Presents Boleros Psicodélicos (ATO Records)—Not to say that Adrian Quesada’s latest is a bad record, only that it does not necessarily deliver what it promises.
Boleros (romantic ballads), sure, but psychedelic? Not to my ear in most instances on this variety pack of an album, though Quesada’s “Hielo Seco” (Dry Ice) instrumental, as played by the versatile and avant guitarist Marc Ribot, in terms of rhythm and timbre owes a decided debt to Santana’s legendary pysch-rock rendition (1970) of Peter Green’s (of early Fleetwood Mac) “Black Magic Woman.” Quesada, a producer and musician best known for being one-half of the Austin “psychedelic soul” outfit Black Pumas, has tried here to recapture the spirit of the
baladas that flourished throughout Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s, synthesizing the
bolero, of Cuban origin, with bossa nova rhythms, influences from Anglo-American rock, and baroque string and harpsichord arrangements, all in service of heart-rending serenades about love gone wrong, love that might have been, and so forth. The album’s first and second halves differ in that the second, with one exception (“El León,” or the Lion), comprises tributes to older Latin American songs, whereas the first is entirely original. Perhaps surprisingly, the originals fare better overall. In fact, the most memorable second-half tune is its first, “Puedes Decir de Mí” (You Can Say about Me), a classic from the legendary Cuban singer La Lupe (Lupe Victoria Yolí Raymond), rendering the rest of the record a letdown. Guatemalan-born, Los Angeles–based Gaby Moreno delivers a crackling, mildly psychedelic version of “Puedes Decir de Mí” in a warbling mezzo with an extra dash of dismissive verve at the end. The other notable cover is the 1975 “Esclavo y Amo” (Slave and Master) from the Peruvian band Los Pasteles Verdes (The Green Pies), who made a career performing mainly in Mexico. This is the song that initially piqued Quesada’s interest and inspired
Boleros Psicodélicos. Capably and wrenchingly delivered by Natalia Clavier, who has toured with the electronic lounge act Thievery Corporation, it nonetheless seems a bit lugubrious by comparison with “Puedes Decir de Mí”; they are similar in that the psychedelia seems a flourish, particularly in the modal keyboard intro, the weepy overtones, and the organ solo by Peter Stopschinski, rather than integral to the piece, which finishes on an unexpected chord change. Easily the weakest on the disc, the final track, “El Muchacho de los Ojos Tristes (The Boy with the Sad Eyes), was issued in 1981-82 by the Maltese/Spanish singer Jeanette (Janette Anne Dimech). Fairly described as “bubblegum” by
Rolling Stone, it shuffles along with wailing
wah-wah guitar outbursts beneath the puffy, too cute vocal stylings of Tita (Moreno)—hard to believe that this is Gaby Moreno’s little sister. Two instrumentals also show up in the second half of the tracklist, and these are the only two selections in which Quesada does not himself play guitar, bass, or keyboards. “Eso No Lo He Dicho Yo” (I Did Not Say That), written by the late, onetime Irakere trombonist Juan Pablo Torres, actually has verses (viz. Omara Portuondo’s 1974 version) but not in the muted, mellow take presented here by a group of musicians with non-Latin-sounding names calling themselves College of Knowledge. With quavery synth tones replacing Portuondo’s voice, it pales by comparison to both the sung rendition and to “Hielo Seco” from earlier on the disc. María Grever, a Mexican composer of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote “Ya No Me Quieres” (You Still Don’t Love Me), but if you go to YouTube to look at vocal/orchestral presentations of this
bolero, the chilly, tremulous organ solo from JaRon Marshall, lasting only around a minute, bears remarkably little resemblance to what you will hear online, sounding more like the between-innings warmup by a ballpark organist. The remainder of the disc consists generally of songs co-written by Quesada and whichever featured guest singer is at bat. Rudy (Rodolfo) de Anda’s odd vocal mannerisms in “El León” detract from what otherwise sounds like a psychedelic setting of a Dominican
bachata. The weepy ascending and descending triplets (piano, with harpsichord filigree) of “El Payaso” (The Clown) begin to wear on the listener, particularly in combination with the breathy, shapeless vocals of Girl Ultra (Mexico’s Mariana de Miguel). Far more satisfying are “Tus Tormentas” (Your Turmoils) with Grammy winner Mireya Ramos of the all-female NYC mariachi outfit Flor de Toloache (as well as her dramatically pealing vocal, she plays the string parts), another song that begins with psychedelic ornamentation before becoming far more straightforward; “El Paraguas” (The Umbrella) with the suave, plaintive singing of the multifaceted, SUNY-Purchase-trained Gabriel Garzón-Montano; and “El Ídolo” (The Idol) with L.A.-born, Richmond-based Angelica Garcia. Not only does Garcia somewhat resemble a Latin Sia (Furler) in her delivery, but the chord changes in “El Ídolo” bring to mind those of “This Fine Social Scene,” sung by Sia on Zero 7’s
The Garden (my 2006 album of the year). The prize “get,” however, was Puerto Rico’s iLe (Ileana Cabra Joglar; see above for her solo album), formerly of Calle 13, for the opener, “Mentiras con Cariño” (Lies with Affection). Her song is a
balada played straight, with little or no bow to the album’s psychedelia concept, but her voice is so winning that she graces anything she touches. The vibraphone-and-flute orchestrations are a nice touch, and the bridge/outro (the only extended instrumental coda on the disc) showcases deft interplay between flute, guitar, and drums.
A-/B+
SESSA, Estrela Acesa (Mexican Summer)—Is it possible for a record in the vein of bossa nova and
MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) to be too languid? Apparently so. Various reviewers of
Estrela Acesa (Burning Star) have found in it what they were looking for: Antônio Carlos Jobim, Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, Jorge Ben. But Sergio Sayeg, who records as Sessa, from São Paulo’s Sephardic Jewish community but having spent part of his youth in the New York area, does not have anything remotely close to Nascimento’s rich vocal talent, the quirkiness or originality of the
Tropicália pioneers like Veloso or Zé, the flair of Ben, or the songwriting brilliance of Jobim. Comparisons to such mid-to-late-twentieth-century Brazilian legends are of course unfair. All the same, Sessa’s shortcomings as a singer are impossible to disguise in an album as spare as this one. Judging by the album’s name alone, a listener might reasonably expect something incandescent. But the title track, at the end of the disc, is dreamy and yearning, foregrounding the singer and his nylon guitar playing in a constricted tonal range, with string flourishes and assistance from a small chorus of female backing voices—in all, a gentle letdown. The record begins promisingly enough, with “Gostar do Mundo” (Taste for the World). What sets this little piece, a fairly explicit homoerotic fantasy, apart from any number of lilting, idyllic Brazilian tunes one might hear in an elevator or a waiting room are its harmonic touches: the moony strings à la Electric Light Orchestra, the otherworldly tangents probed by Sessa’s bassist, Marcelo Cabral. Because Sessa’s voice is hardly winning, the songs in which it is more clipped or set back amid the arrangements are relatively more successful, to wit, “Canção da Cura” (Song of Healing), “Pele da Esfera” (Skin Sphere), or “Ponta de Faca” (Knifepoint). Harder to take are those in which he attempts to sustain a melody: “Sereia Sentimental” (Sentimental Siren), “Dor Fodida” (F’ing Pain), “Irmão de Nuvem” (Cloud-Brother), and “Que Lado Você Dorme?” (On What Side Do You Sleep?). The first of these is particularly wan, as its tune degrades almost instantly into a sort of yawn, so relaxed as to be shapeless. “Irmão de Nuvem” has a more durable melody, but that does not give it staying power, as its mewling, beseeching tone is distinctly unappealing. The sole instrumental (though it does have wordless singing), “Helena,” is winsome in a droopy way but punchless. Points in the artist’s favor: the chromatic shifts in “Dor Fodida” and passages of Juana Molina–like (see the 2008, 2013, and 2017 music surveys) chiaroscuro orchestration in “Que Lado Você Dorme?” give some texture and dimension to otherwise anodyne, driftless songs. “Pele da Esfera,” though less than stellar, is Sessa’s shot at neo-Tropicalism and does have a funk dynamo at its core, in the interplay between Sayeg’s and Cabral’s guitars. “Ponta de Faca,” though again tonally cramped, experiments in psychedelics with its otherworldly flute overtones from Gabriel Milliet, casting back to yet another Brazilian tradition from the late sixties/early seventies. Speaking of misleading titles, “Dor Fodida” and “Ponta de Faca” seem to promise high drama and emotion, yet they are every bit as torpid as the rest. And, peculiarly enough, the two songs named after “music,” “Música” and “Você É a Música” (You Are Music), are the least musical, in terms of melody/harmony, on the disc, largely percussive and incantatory, along the lines of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas from Cuba. Lacking the spiritual resonance of Los Muñequitos, the clandestine magic of Molina, the verve of the Brazilian masters of yesteryear, or charismatic vocals, all
Estrela Acesa has to offer is some pretty guitarwork and, here and there, an ear-pricking arrangement—it is not nearly enough to carry the disc.
B/B-
SMILE, Phantom Island (Chimp Limbs Recordings)—Not to be confused with The Smile (see immediately below), Smile is a pairing not of Oxfordshire lads from Radiohead but of veteran Swedish musicians Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John (“PB&J”; see the 2009 music survey) and Joakim “Jocke” Åhlund of Les Big Byrd (see the 2018 music survey), as well as a couple of other groups. Both have produced songs and records by other acts, in and out of Sweden, and Yttling has written tunes for other artists as well. This record was a late entry into the survey, as it was never clear (conflicting information on the internet) as to whether it was published in late 2021 or early 2022.
Phantom Island, named for an illusion that sailors sometimes perceive, is a collection of ten mostly instrumental, poppy numbers with a bright sheen. But these cannot be readily dismissed as fluff; Yttling is too talented a songwriter for that. Witness the heart-rending elegance of the quasi–West African guitar line backing “Special Knock” or the intricacies of the arrangements in “Landsort.” “Troll-holk” is a miniature gem of piercing harmony, transposed through different instrumental configurations and slowed down toward the conclusion. Yttling has favored whistling since the days of PB&J, and he does so here on both “Special Knock” (backed by a string quartet) and “Different Kind of Fog” (where it carries the melody, imprecisely, later repeated by other instruments, including a xylophone). “Kattens Pyjamas” and “Landsort” both feature the electric guitar of Andrew Innes, of Primal Scream. The former starts as a chugging, percolating synthesizer dreamscape, then assumes an alternate identity with a clipped, fast drumbeat and, if you wait long enough, a wailing modal run from Innes. The latter, like “Troll-holk,” circulates between various orchestrations of the same stirring motif. There is a darker element to “Different Kind of Fog” in its guitar accompaniment and bass chords; it thus opens up to feelings beyond that querying but jejune whistled theme. The title track at the end of the record is quiet and ruminative, played primarily on the uppermost piano keys. The songs with words are in some ways the least remarkable. The Swedish pop singer Robyn (Robin Miriam Carlsson), who broke onto the scene in the mid-nineties with “Show Me Love,” graces “Call My Name,” backed by Freja Drakenberg (a.k.a. “Freja the Dragon”), a song that is fizzy pop, warm in tone if hardly groundbreaking. Drakenberg returns to duet with Åhlund (I think) on “Eon,” the most nondescript tune on the disc. For the dance-friendly “Dress for Success,” something that might have fallen out of RuPaul’s closet—showy, banal, but fun—the pair deploy a
vocoder to process the lyrics. The record kicks off with its longest track, “Kylie,” another silky dance groove with echoes of Giorgio Moroder, with whom Åhlund has actually worked, and
Tubular Bells (1973; I do not believe either has ever collaborated with Mike Oldfield). The middle sections incorporate a wordless chorus.
Phantom Island never takes itself too seriously, and neither should we, but pure enjoyments, when done well, are not something to knock.
A-/B+
THE SMILE, A Light for Attracting Attention (XL Recordings)—Is forty percent of Radiohead better than the band as a whole? Not on the evidence of
A Light for Attracting Attention. Thom Yorke supplied the album’s vocals and lyrics, and his Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood was responsible for the nonvocal music plus arrangements, while both played multiple instruments save percussion (Tom Skinner). Too much of the record is too static, more extended vignettes than true songs. There are exceptions, naturally. The full flowering of this experiment takes place with “Pana-vision,” which was used in the series finale of the television show
Peaky Blinders. This is songwriting of the first rank: atmospheric, intricately chromatic, brooding, psychologically penetrating, as the narrator sees and is in turn perceived in a panopticon of stark revelations and humiliations more widely than he can tolerate, leading to a desire to wipe the slate clean and become “like a newborn child.” As good as anything from the more interior Radiohead albums that followed
OK Computer (1997) or from Yorke’s fine first solo record,
The Eraser (2006). Nothing else on the disc comes close, though there is merit elsewhere in less comprehensive fashion. “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings” is zippy and propulsive, with keening, shrill Mellotron-ish sustained tones that are a throwback to the era of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s magisterial
Architecture and Morality (1981). Its sung portion is somewhat less than the equal of the orchestrations, as Yorke’s verse is more exhortative than expressive, and the chorus, though tinged with pathos, is basically one line that never gains any depth. The most stirring arrangement, a bittersweet, somber amalgam of synthesizer arpeggios and piano, accompanies “Open the Floodgates.” I only wish that the sung verse (there is no chorus to speak of) had more to recommend it than the chord change that colors its final line. “Thin Thing” is fizzy and energetic yet also too monochrome and rather stringy to serve as an entrée. Hardly the most inspiring of titles, “A Hairdryer” features “Dear Prudence” (1968)–like guitar picking technique and a background drone—and, as in “Open the Floodgates,” a lazily unchanging vocal part—one phrase repeated ad infinitum, even if the stacked instrumentation at the song’s climax offers a moment of thrilling urgency. Of the other compositions, “Speech Bubbles” and “Free in the Knowledge” make an effort at genuine songfulness, but the former is gently ruminative and not much more, and the latter is simply not one of Yorke’s stronger songs, somewhat resembling “Pride (In the Name of Love)” (1984) but with U2’s rousing chorus replaced by a tentatively probing, pallid falsetto refrain. The cleverly named “You Will Never Work in Television Again” is more hortatory still than “We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings,” while “The Opposite” and “The Smoke” are fueled by slyly funky bass lines that are well conceived and electric, yet the songs have little else going for them. It is impossible to guess whether the Smile was just a Covid-era project or if there will be more Greenwood-Yorke partnering; if so, the pair could do with more directness and relatability to go along with the ambient effects.
B+
REGINA SPEKTOR, Home, Before and After (Sire Records/Warner Music Group)—Regina Spektor waxes philosophical (and theological) in parables on her latest disc. Her lyrics are still creatively offbeat, rarely lacking for interest. The craftsmanship of her songwriting, honed at the artsy State University of New York at Purchase, is impeccable. Yet, somehow, much of
Home, Before and After disappoints. Alas, the pressures of having a major-label recording contract seem to have sanded the quirkiness off her music, precisely the characteristic that made her stand out among singer/songwriters. Or perhaps it is just the approach of middle age and newfound domestic responsibilities—who really knows? As I complained in reviewing her previous release,
Remember Us to Life (see the 2016 music survey), her writing has become overly formulaic, as if there were a Simplicity blueprint behind each one (viz., “Raindrops” or “What Might Have Been”). There is some genuine poignancy to the opening number, “Becoming All Alone,” accentuated by the string and choral arrangements (a combination of Spektor’s voice and that of her husband, Jack Dishel) during the development of the verse section, as the narrator reaches out to cultivate a personal relationship with God. But the refrain is too short and feels unfinished, as if the audience had been cheated out of the expected resolution. In contrast, the plea in “One Man’s Prayer” is shocking solely for the way it morphs from a cry of repressed sexual loneliness to one of domination and outright cruelty; certainly the musically inert theme—just Spektor’s voice with some drumming and light instrumentation—does not help it along, capped by another ho-hum chorus. One song that does have a musically engaging chorus, “Sugar Man,” fails for once to pair it with any kind of real lyric, just repeating the title and “sugar daddy.” So we are left with a verse portion that is drab in terms of songwriting but tells an artful cautionary tale about the perils of a relationship based on financial dependency and how feelings can curdle into resentment, and a refrain whose moody chromatic progressions are one of the most appealing compositional devices on the album but that expresses nothing at all—again, the listener might well feel stiffed. “Up the Mountain” is an unconventional hybrid: I have no doubt that the lyric was inspired in part by some of the repetitive-verse Hebrew songs sung at Passover seders, so there is that folky substrate, culminating in a swoony “Hurry, hurry…” refrain. Yet the song is set (by producer John Congleton) to a moderate dance beat, with more elaborate instrumentation (horns and strings) than one would typically find in folk. Toward the end of the record, Spektor does try some different things, with varying degrees of success. “Spacetime Fairytale,” by far the longest song at nearly nine minutes, begins typically, with the singer at the piano, effortlessly pealing out arpeggiated figures, but near the four-minute mark morphs rhythmically and timbrally into a peculiar sort of tap dance. Then it reverts to its original form, with heavier instrumentation, concluding with a bizarrely portentous accompanied vocal—whose effect then dissipates into a resumption of the tap dance. Woolly and lugubrious, yes, hardly top-shelf Regina Spektor, but at least she is not on autopilot here. The lyrics in the pensive “Loveology” manage to be at once amusing and tedious; what lifts it beyond standard-issue Spektor comes near the end, with the intensification of the chorus, as she cunningly interweaves it with the opening verse, “Oh, an incurable humanist you are.” The Jewish concept of
t’shuvah, or repentance, the notion that in order to return to God one must make amends with one’s fellow human beings, is threaded throughout the song. The final offering, “Through a Door,” sounds spectral, unlike anything else on the disc. It is especially haunting when, at a pause midway through, children’s playground voices are briefly incorporated into the sustain drifting off the main melody. And here Spektor finally hits the target with a chorus that is both piercing and rings true emotionally. Better still is “Coin,” whose sober yet lilting, storytelling verse gives way three times to a stirring chorus, with shifting rather than repeating words, becoming more deeply personal and swelling with fiery passion by the final iteration. That is precisely the kind of artistic statement that Spektor should be making from her newly world-wise and mature perspective. It is only too bad there are not more songs of this caliber on
Home, Before and After. I respect Spektor too much to give her a bad mark, yet “Coin” and “Through a Door” demonstrate how much more there might have been.
B+
BARTEES STRANGE, Farm to Table (4AD)—Stylistically eclectic or unfocused? Either pole of interpretation may have some validity when approaching the second album, and first major-label recording, by Bartees Strange. Strange, whose real name is Bartees Leon Cox, Jr., has an unusual background: born in Ipswich, England, to a military family that moved around a lot, raised in Oklahoma, he was a member of a postpunk band in Brooklyn for a short time before relocating to Washington, D.C., where his first album release (
Live Forever, 2020) spanned disciplines as diverse as hip-hop, jazz, and rock, following a folky EP in 2017. Folk-inflected rock is still his default mode; at heart, he is a troubadour with an electric guitar. Although for me the genre’s appeal is limited, such that nothing on
Farm to Table is truly gripping, there is a fundamental integrity to his songwriting throughout. The opener, “Heavy Heart,” combines a reflective verse whose lyrics might be deeply personal but read like random thoughts popping up (“You look so nice in a cherry scarf/We should go to Toronto more often”) with a rocking chorus of considerable force. “Black Gold” is similar in structure, but the refrain is, instead of a rolling set of power chords, a plangent, descending-scale falsetto whose piercing regret is then alleviated by a luminous outro that samples voices in conversation and singing together. The final number, “Hennessy,” is striking in that it has the sparest setting: voice and acoustic guitar, with a touch of piano accompaniment from his frequent co-writer and arranger Chris Connors—a moody, bluesy piece in which the singer engages in call-and-response with himself (all the male vocals are his). Again, the words are straight from the heart, confessional in nature, and yet the overlay of verses can feel like a succession of non-sequiturs, or maybe it is verbal collage. The album is most weakly supported at its center. A number of critics have cited “Hold the Line” as an especially strong entry, a “message” song directed to the young daughter of George Floyd, killed by Minneapolis police at the height of the pandemic, but I find its shifting perspectives baffling and unconvincing and Strange’s bleating tone a detraction in this country-folk hybrid. Likewise, the folky “Tours,” pondering the singer’s relationship with his mother, is alternately subdued and raspy, straining for an emotional resonance it never quite achieves. I can appreciate the “stop the world, I want to get off” sentiment of “Escape This Circus” or the raw intensity of the climax to “Wretched” without really warming toward either song. Some of the most interesting developments take place when Strange is experimenting. I have never been a fan of Auto-Tune, but he uses it sparingly in “Cosigns” for an otherworldly sensation. Following a bouncy, tonally dark intro that could have been imported from an electronic dance music track, his digitally altered voice boasts, rapper-style, of being “already friends” with tour mates like Courtney (Barnett), Phoebe (Bridgers), and Lucy (Dacus), as well as Justin (Timberlake? Bieber?), with niftily precise rhythmic phrasing. At the song’s culmination, his undistorted voice comes to the fore with an urgency that belies the smugness of what came earlier, admitting that the hunger for fame and acknowledgment never abates—even as the rhythm pattern becomes much more straightforward. Meantime, “We Were Only Close for Like Two Weeks” lasts less than a minute, with the song title being the only verse, a fascinatingly sour, sullen guitar theme with breaks and electronic distortions to underline the whispered protest of a lyric—there is actually quite a lot going on in those fifty-eight seconds!
Farm to Table is a statement from a promising artist who is still searching, still coming into his sense of self, and its hit-or-miss qualities are not so surprising in that context.
A-/B+
WET LEG, Wet Leg (Domino Recording Co.)—As U.K. postpunk bands go, this is not of one the more exciting, though Wet Leg did make a splash with the issuance of the single for “Chaise Longue” in 2021 and its accompanying video. Following genre conventions,
Wet Leg consists generally of short, (sometimes) punchy numbers with thrumming bass, rudimentary melodies, and sometimes bawdy lyrics. Only occasionally are there interesting arrangements, and the tunes strike me as fairly predictable and obvious. Wall Street analysts’ reports talk of “earnings surprise”; here, there is no melodic surprise, and indeed little compositional development of any kind, rather, an excess of repetitive elements. “Chaise Longue” itself has no melody at all; its double-entendre verses are spoken by Rhian Teasdale, and the only thing keeping it from being a rhythmic blank verse poetry recital is the periodic accompanying guitar riff. With no singing, it draws comparison to Dry Cleaning (see above), except that Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning is far droller and more creative in her lyric writing. Better are the opening number, “Being in Love,” and the second single, “Wet Dream.” Even in these songs, the verse section is sung in an unrelenting monotone, with the color relief coming only from the chorus. “Being in Love” is dreamy in nature but its sound could be interchangeable with any number of postpunk bands trending toward a broader pop audience from thirty or forty years ago. Teasdale’s mannered, somewhat muffled, old-lady-in-a-tea-shop-before-her-time singing voice shares qualities with Amelia Meath’s of Sylvan Esso (see the 2014, 2017, and 2020 music surveys). “Wet Dream” is the most fully formed composition (that is, even the verse is through-composed) and the most appealing musically, even if the lyrics, concerning a horny and exhibitionist boyfriend, are off-color. “Ur Mum,” another single, “Piece of Sh*t,” and “Too Late Now” also bend toward a broader pop audience, being more overtly melodic (except for the spoken/rapped section in the middle of “Too Late Now”). The verses ring truest in the quasi-psychedelic “Angelica” and in “Loving You.” “Angelica,” with its mechanistic guitar syncopations and smeary synth tones, is about being at a party, not fitting in even as you envy those who do (Angelica, for example), and wishing you could vanish. By contrast, “Loving You,” is musical gruel, but the burning resentment of an ex- and his new girlfriend burns through the sonic murk. The blunt directness and brute simplicity of “Oh No” verges on the experimental, like something Micachu and the Shapes (see the 2009 and 2012 music surveys) might have put out, before that band changed its name to Good Sad Happy Bad. “Supermarket” seems particularly pointless, a song with nothing to say and no distinctiveness. The Wet Leg debut drew plenty of critical attention, in no small part because it is on a prominent label, and much of it was favorable. But the buzz led me to expect far more than this so-so effort actually delivered.
B
NILÜFER YANYA, Painless (ATO Records)—For many performers, the sophomore slump is anything but mythical. Nilüfer Yanya has put out several EPs since 2016, so one can quibble with that designation, but in fact
Painless is just her second full-length release. And given what a smash her first,
Miss Universe (see the 2019 music survey), was, the odds were on this one being a letdown. Unfortunately, the oddsmakers more than covered. The new record is strangely subdued, with a limited emotional range and tonal palette, lacking the spark of her debut. Moreover,
Miss Universe essentially kicked off with one of the songs of the decade, “In Your Head.” While
Painless also begins with its strongest cut, “The Dealer,” its appeal does not approach the visceral thrill of its predecessor. “The Dealer” wins style points for being breezy and swingy but is hitched to a somewhat bland and dun-hued melody (in truth, the same could be said for “In Your Head,” but that song was far more emotionally freighted). Yanya’s alto, moving at times into female falsetto, is thick and grainy, with more character than beauty. From its moderately promising start, the tracklist’s appeal runs down a gentle slope, falling off the continental shelf toward the end, as none of the last three songs amounts to much of anything. The strength of the album is in its guitar accompaniment and other arrangements, combined with subtle chromatic shifts in songs such as the sonorous “Midnight Sun” and “Trouble,” as well as “Company” (whose theme seems inspired by movies about artificial intelligence such as Spike Jonze’s
Her from a decade ago), their chiaroscuro compensating to some degree for the absence of melody. The tune “L/R” is all about its cool bass line; subtract that element and it would feel robotic. “Chase Me” also features a lively bass groove and is somewhat more full-bodied, if still too tonally constrained to take flight. “Shameless,” a gentle rocker relying on dotted-note rhythms, initially seems a dud, with washed-out colors, but over the course of the song develops some resonance and emotional depth by changing its harmonic sequences in the chorus. “Stabilise” is vigorously paced and percussive but is otherwise tuneless and underdeveloped. “Try” does not try hard enough, lounging on a slow triplet pattern, drained of energy. I found myself impatient, wanting something more like the screwball concept the first album offered, and frustrated by little things, such as the discrepancies between the lyrics as printed in the CD jacket and as actually sung by Yanya. (The cover art design and photos are excellent, by the way, done by Yanya herself, together with her younger sister Elif and older sister, photographer Molly Daniel.) The first record had production, including “In Your Head,” by the veteran John Congleton. This one relies heavily on Will Archer (who also had production credits on the first), both for production and as co-writer on multiple songs, whereas the least impressive song, the drippy and repetitive “Belong with You,” was co-written with Jazzi Bobbi, the daughter of Spargo keyboardist and singer Ellert Driessen, from the Netherlands. When she tries for a third time, Yanya needs to hook herself up with a stronger tunesmith and to try and recapture what made her first album such a breath of fresh air.
B+/B
YĪN YĪN, The Age of Aquarius (Glitterbeat Records)—What the world needs now is … ersatz Asian dance music from outer space? Maastricht-based Yīn Yīn, paying at least oblique homage to the musical
Hair (1967) and the song the Fifth Dimension popularized, went its own way on its second album,
The Age of Aquarius. Drawing, if lightly, on sources from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, the Dutch band made a record to amuse itself and by extension its fan base. Multi-instrumentalist Yves Lennertz (who left the band following this recording), drummer Kees Berkers, and the musicians they recruited were not inclined to dwell on tendentious questions about cultural appropriation or “authenticity”; leave that to others. Even so, one can make the case that their musical tourism is more superficial than that of fellow Netherlanders Altın Gün, whose Anatolian/global mix, at least on
Yol (see the 2021 music survey), is based more firmly in actual Turkish sources and whose membership includes a couple of Turkish-born singers. Unsurprisingly,
Yol is the superior record, but this is not to disparage
The Age of Aquarius, which is thoroughly enjoyable. Slight, at barely half an hour’s duration, its eight tracks begin with “Satya Yuga” and end with “Kali Yuga.” In Hindu theology, Kali Yuga is the fourth and worst of the world ages in a cycle, filled with strife and corruption, to be followed by the first age in a renewal, Satya Yuga, a divine “golden age.” So what does it say about the band’s outlook that the record concludes on such a grim portent? “Kali Yuga” the song, high-pitched in synthesized Asian strings, cushioned by sober sustained tones, is more contemplatively neutral than ominous as an outro. The intro, “Satya Yuga,” is quite similar, if shorter, with the “strings” taken down a register and animated faint voices in the background. The Euro-disco tracks, “Chong Wang” (named for a mystical first-century Chinese philosopher, and no direct connection to Wang Chung) and “Nautilus,” both spiced with Orientalist pentatonic themes, replete with handclaps, and, in each instance, motored by a bass line that is a throwback to the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” (1976), are trashy fun. The somewhat slower numbers “Shenzhou V” and “Declined by Universe” are a kind of Asianbeat equivalent to the Afrobeat of outfits such as the Budos Band (see the 2007 and 2010 music surveys), with a relaxed funk infusing their essence. “Shenzhou V,” named for a class of Chinese manned spacecraft, which inspired
Star Trek: Discovery’s U.S.S.
Shenzhou, begins and ends with a sprinkling of cosmic satellite beeps, followed by some very Budos-like guitar riffs, then heavy syncopation and a Kraftwerk-style timbre in the electronic keyboards. A drum processional involving traditional-sounding instruments and much overdubbing kicks off “Declined by Universe,” before the guitar tremolos sketch out a melody in support of its “those rejected by the establishment, unite!” stance. The title tune is akin to one of the tracks put out by Public Service Broadcasting (see the 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2021 music surveys): a “narrated” danceable groove, in this case, an unidentified speaker lecturing on Hindu cosmology as it relates to the song’s topic. The most sophisticated blending of traditional and modern happens with “Faiyadansu,”
japonaiserie that incorporates a zither-like instrument, the
koto, and drumming from an antique Japanese record, and interspersing a sampling of a woman’s voice (speaking Japanese? hard to say). Yīn Yīn’s easily engaging album is a lark, but one with a more serious purpose at its core.
A-/B+
MISCELLANEOUS (GENRE-FLUID)
HORSE LORDS, Comradely Objects (RVNG International/ Plancha)—The chief drawback of
Comradely Objects, the fifth album (there have also been several mixtapes) from the Baltimore avant-garde ensemble Horse Lords (several of them have recently relocated to Germany), is that the final composition, “Plain Hunt on Four,” would tax the patience of a bodhisattva, while “Law of Movement” has in fact very little movement and is therefore only a modest improvement. These two tracks take up nearly half the record. “Plain Hunt on Four” cycles through the same eight-note sequence for more than eight minutes, with barely discernible variations in emphasis or the drumming of Sam Haberman backing the relentless iterations. “Law of Movement” begins with some blaring white noise electronics before launching into its thematic cell, a crunchy guitar riff whose accents give a sense of syncopation, while the blare becomes its undercurrent. Both the riff and the undercurrent undergo subtle changes over the course of ten-plus minutes, the longest piece on offer. The record is all about obsessively working over certain musical patterns, but the other tracks give the listener’s ear some relief. Two of them, “Solidarity Avenue” and “Rundling,” are fairly short. An instrument (or synthesizer) like an African
kora starts things off in “Zero Degree Machine”; its cycling is nearly smothered by the repetition of three descending notes played on a fuzzy bass by Max Eilbacher. But more electronics are layered atop these elements, with rhythms varying in speed and syncopation; toward the end, it is simplified again, just the bass, together with Andrew Bernstein’s saxophone. A jaunty piano vamp kicks off “Mess Mend,” followed by some intricate guitarwork that emulates bluegrass, at least in spirit, before devolving into something that varies from light honking to a facsimile of a
jaw harp. “May Brigade” plays around with a beepy, syncopated motif for saxophone and guitar that set me to thinking about Tom Zé’s “Jimi Renda-Se” (Jimi Surrenders), the alt take of his original from 1973 (with a slightly different spelling), from
Jogos de Armar (2000), which incorporates São Paulo traffic noises into the mix. Eventually, Bernstein’s sax playing becomes woolly and untamed, which is entertaining in its own right, if very noisy. A much more orderly sax theme, again varying in rhythmic pattern, graces “Rundling,” bursting into a lovely set of arpeggios toward the close. “Solidarity Avenue” hews to a dark groove, surreptitious in nature. I do wish that Horse Lords was a bit less monomaniacal about its compositions, but at least on
Comradely Objects, that is key to how these four guys work. And, at least on the first half of the album, it all works pretty well.
A-/B+
TITANS TO TACHYONS, Vonals (Tzadik Records)—Avant-garde guitar music with cross-pollination of metal and jazz,
Vonals kicks butt. Recording on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, with Zorn himself as executive producer, it is not at all surprising that his influence pervades this album, particularly, among his many ensembles, his rock/metal-oriented Simulacrum, whose self-titled debut (see the 2015 music survey) included the drummer, Kenny Grohowski, and a bass guitarist, Matt Hollenberg, in Titans to Tachyons. Led by New Zealand native Sally Gates on guitar, the group’s unconventional lineup now features two bassists—Trevor Dunn is the other—as well as lead guitar and drums. The effect can be, and often is, bone rattling, but sheer electric noise is not the point. Gates’s notes on the CD packaging, referencing quantum physics and nonlinear time, as well as hypnotic states and Salvador Dalí, are kind of far out there. But more to the point, she discusses patterns of threes, sixes, and nines in the music, also the three-against-two pattern of the
clave and the musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky’s studies of twelve-tone serialist patterns. She has discussed in interviews how science fiction and the soundtracks of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick films feed into her composition. None of this is necessary to appreciate the spread that
Vonals lays out for us. The successor to the group’s first album,
Cactides (2020), when it was a trio, with Dunn as a special guest, it consists of six tracks, including the short “Close the Valve & Wait,” which is pure improvisation, bubbly and frenetic clamor, then softening and becoming full of sustain. The opener, “Neutron Wrangler,” is tempestuous and restless, with little string squeals piquing the attacks—a cartoonish element has always been integral to Zorn World music. Midway through, the improvisational passages grow more lyrical and modal, without losing the feistiness entirely, later slowing to just quiet strumming before the cacophony of the opening theme makes a brief comeback. “Vacuum Symmetry” is cooler and more relaxed, with hints of intrigue in its middle section, although the bass improv gets a little wild and screechy, and the pace and urgency pick up toward the close. A metal-heavy introductory theme, slower but thunderous and leaden, propels “Critical Paranoia,” but between its iterations are softer, atonal passages for solo guitar. The piece concludes with a free-form coda embroidering on the primary musical notion. Tremulous and a bit spooky, “Wax Hypnotic” evokes scenes from
Blade Runner before getting more thrash-y and boiling over. There is a tremendous extended passage in which the guitar first and then the basses etch out a mysterious riff that is a pounding monotone with shifting harmonics underneath. And, in a surprise, a louche little melody enters the picture just before wailing guitars bring the whole business to a blustery close. “Blue Thought Particles,” the closer, is maybe a little less spellbinding but does contain some lyrically appealing subtheme intervals as well as a fiery, volcanic solo by Gates. More whimsy, like Wile E. Coyote running in place, ignites the serial episodes of shredding that put an emphatic finale on the record.
A
JAZZ
FAZER, Plex (City Slang)—The quintet behind
Plex, an album with fusion elements that manages to sound fairly conventional for the most part, went to school together at Munich’s Academy for Music and Theatre, studying jazz. The lineup is atypical for a jazz ensemble, in that it is guitar-heavy (Paul Brändle on lead guitar, Martin Brugger on bass) and includes two drummers. According to the German label’s own press release, this configuration allows “the band’s spacious, organic sound [to pitch] lyrical melodies from guitar and trumpet over dual-drummer polyrhythmic grooves and dub-like basslines with a distinct EthioJazz vibe.” Unsurprisingly, the P.R. might be overstating the case. It speaks of the band freely shifting between composition and improvisation, but it is rare on this record for anyone but the trumpeter, Matthias Lindermayr, to take as much as a brief solo. And even the trumpet improvisations are relatively tame. The result in songs such as “Grenadier,” “Fannie’s Theme,” or “Cycle” is jazz that sounds pretty but is one level above Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” (1977/78). There is a hint of
Ethiopian jazz to the loping pentatonic bass accompaniment to “Grenadier,” as well as in a few other spots. Fazer is at its best when departing from settled patterns, particularly in the opener, “Ghazal,” named for a form of Arabic poetry that later spread to Persia and India. Yet “Ghazal” is a short piece, a mere hors d’oeuvre of percussion and spiky bass plucking overlaid by a few dreamy guitar chords and truncated trumpet runs. “Thea,” “Dezember” (December), and “Cuentro” are mellow, moody compositions, richly burnished and well conceived, while not especially daring. The muted, shifting color palette of “Morning” is a nice touch, as are the skewed chromatics (straying a certain distance from standard tonality) and pronounced percussive accents of the final number, “Nago.” “Prague” establishes a bluish ambience through its repeated oscillations, both tonally and rhythmically, between on- and off-the-beat duple-note patterns. “Jaculysses” rises above the commonplace with its guitar pizzicato, its cantering triplet patterns, and its searching, restive, forlorn trumpet theme.
B+
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