MUSIC 2023: A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY

MUSIC 2023:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield

December 31, 2024

GENERAL COMMENTS

    Ah, 2023.  It ended a year ago, and most of us, including me, have already forgotten what it was like.  In light of the disastrous self-inflicted wound American voters dealt us in November 2024, however, we may look back on it as a golden age, yearning to trade for Joe Biden’s gaffes and stumbles in place of Donald Trump’s malevolence, greed, vindictiveness, self-dealing, and sheer incompetence.  Hamas, the Islamist terrorists pretending to be the “government” of Gaza, launched an attack on Jews the scale of which had not been seen since the Holocaust, and most of the world, after a pause to gasp, predictably and depressingly blamed Israel exclusively for the ensuing violence.  Other conflicts around the world, from Sudan to Congo to Burma to Syria to Ukraine, were instantly ignored by the media and most politicians.  I stopped watching BBC World News on television in protest.

    In the world of music, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and Billie Eilish had a good year, and … (stifles a yawn).  Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” was deemed the top song globally by Spotify, and just as you were wondering if Miley Cyrus might be too old to be relevant anymore.  This was followed at #2 by SZA’s “Kill Bill,” which was memorable not for the music, which is underwhelming, but for the sheer violence of the music video (OK, much of it stylized and all of it fake), which says a lot about where we are as a culture.  Cyrus also won a Grammy for Record (meaning single) of the Year for the same song, and Swift won for best album.  In the country-pop sphere, Zach Bryan was deemed by Billboard to be the best new artist of the year.  Lizzo having won a Grammy for best single for the previous year, was hit with a lawsuit by some of her former backup dancers, alleging sexual harassment.

There were again no live popular music performances worth remarking on for the year in my own experience, though it was nice to be getting back to Carnegie Hall several times a year for visiting orchestras following the pandemic.  I did not make it to Celebrate Brooklyn! at all during the year.

    Notable deaths from 2023 included a number of percussionists:  Fred White, drummer for Earth, Wind & Fire, Jim Gordon of Derek and the Dominos and Traffic, Yukihiro Takahashi of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Robbie Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive.  Also the incomparable Burt Bacharach, the equally incomparable Harry Belafonte, Jeff Beck, David Crosby, Jimmy Buffett, Tina Turner, Sinead O’Connor, Gordon Lightfoot, Tony Bennett, Tom Verlaine, Robbie Robertson, Lisa Marie Presley, Jane Birkin, Astrud Gilberto, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Charles Gayle, Menahem Pressler (classical pianist), André Watts (also a classical pianist), Kaija Saariaho (composer), David Del Tredici (also a composer), Zdenĕk Mácal (conductor), Yuri Temirkanov (also a conductor), Renata Scotto (soprano), Ahmad Jamal, Huey “Piano” Smith, Wayne Shorter, Carla Bley, Les McCann, Gary Wright (the “Dream Weaver”), Steve Mackey of Pulp, Robin Lumley of Brand X (I have their debut album with Phil Collins on it), Rolf Harris (of “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” fame), Andy Rourke of the Smiths, Bernie Marsden of Whitesnake, Geordie Walker of the Killing Joke, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, Colombian cumbia singer Lisandro Meza.  Also also Raquel Welch and Tom Smothers.  Walter Ferguson, a Panamanian-born calypso singer and songwriter, gave up the ghost at 103.

    My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2023, to my friends Richard Katz and Suzanne Mirra, and to my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Ariel, for their support.  Most of all, my appreciation goes to my fiancée, Melissa, for continuing to put up with my taking the holiday week in the final week of December wrapping up this survey, playing the same albums in her living room, on her Bose CD player, again and again.

The year’s winner is a longtime pop hero of mine, Peter Gabriel, for his first studio album in two decades.  It is as strong as anything he has put out as a solo artist, so the long wait paid off!  Other highlights included old-timer Robyn Hitchcock with his first-ever all-instrumental record, postpunk newcomer Water from Your Eyes, Blondshell’s debut, a vastly improved effort from Bdrmm, Grizzly Bear guitarist and singer Daniel Rossen’s solo venture, and Turkish/Dutch band Altın Gün’s latest.

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

1.    Peter Gabriel, i/o
2.    Altın Gün, Aşk
3.    Daniel Rossen, You Belong There
4.    Water from Your Eyes, Everyone’s Crushed
5.    Robyn Hitchcock, Love after Infinity
6.    Blondshell, Blondshell
7.    Bdrmm, I Don’t Know
8.    Matmos, Return to Archive
9.    The Clientele, I Am Not There Anymore
10.    Caroline Polachek, Desire, I Want to Turn into You


    ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

PETER GABRIEL, i/o (Real World Records)—The last time Peter Gabriel put out a record of original songs, the world was a very different place, and we were all, including PG, a lot younger.  But like Father Time, Gabriel himself is relatively unchanged, musically speaking.  That is largely a good thing since his music, if offering no surprises, has aged well and his songwriting has lost none of its panache, even as the years have added a veneer of hard-earned wisdom.  Any of the twelve songs on i/o would sit comfortably on the tracklist of the serene Up (2002), Gabriel’s previous disc (counting out a couple of albums of remakes).  In the interim, he has been busy producing artists from around the globe for his own Real World Records label and serving as a human rights advocate, as well as remixing his own songs and those of others.  i/o’s scene setter, “Panopticom,” is also its most engaging tune, a smoldering synthesis of the stealthy, dark interiority of Us (1992), various eclectically cosmopolitan harmonic influences he absorbed through his founding of the World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival, and urgency expressed via the progressive rock that is his touchstone as the onetime lead singer of Genesis, with the spare guitar accompaniment to the refrain breaking through like a shaft of sunlight.  The Ivorian-French drummer Manu Katché plays on this and many other tracks, with Tony Levin of King Crimson on bass and Brian Eno providing sonic effects including “haunting synths.”  Another sterling piece is “Four Horses,” taking inspiration from a Buddhist parable about the best way to approach spiritual practice, and featuring Gabriel’s daughter Melanie on backing vocals.  Darkly atmospheric, with a sinuous through-line that ends with the singer briefly rising to a falsetto cry, it penetrates deep into the soul.  “Road to Joy” has a South African lilt, bounce, and shimmer, with an assist from the Soweto Gospel Choir, yet, far from cultural appropriation, it remains very much a classic Gabriel song, tuneful but with roiling synths—it abruptly truncates at the close.  The track with the most rousing refrain, casting back to Paul Simon’s South African–inflected Graceland (1986) and replete with what sounds like mbira, is “Olive Tree,” mustering the forces of the New Blood Orchestra; even here, though, the passages leading up to that celebration have the indelible stamp of Gabriel’s compositional DNA.  Also deploying the New Blood Orchestra, to embellish an introductory ambience worthy of Sigur Rós and to provide a bridge led by a cello soloist, is “And Still,” featuring the album’s most poignant melody and a contemplative spoken passage.  “Playing for Time” and “So Much” have an elegant simplicity that harks back to the heartfelt tunes of Gabriel’s “middle career” as a solo artist; the former builds a nice orchestral edifice just prior to the conclusion, whereas the latter remains plaintively soft-spoken throughout.  “Love Can Heal” fits the same mold, with a nice harmonic touch in a rising synth sequence at the bridge.  “The Court” is stately, with intriguing rhythmic programming, but its refrain is too slight, and its philosophical reach exceeds its expository capability.  Similarly, the title track is too pat melodically, though it partially redeems itself through a more active and fluid chorus.  The closing track, “Live and Let Live,” brings back the Soweto Gospel Choir, as well as the New Blood Orchestra, for another stirring chorus.  But before that kicks in, and following the main body of the song, there is an extended interlude in which the singer pays tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and others that feels tacked on, pumping up the composition’s length on a record that exceeds 68 minutes in toto.  The CD set comes with three discs, the “Bright-Side” and “Dark-Side” mixes, which strike me as little different from each other, and the “In-Side” mix, whose Blu-ray format will not play on the standard CD players I use; thus, I have not heard it.  If any record can be said to have been worth a two-decade wait, it is i/o, a sumptuous, thoroughly considered, and well-mastered addition to the Peter Gabriel catalogue.  It is also likely the last Gabriel recording that I review, as he is yet another Brit artist who is refusing to perform in Israel.  I made an exception to my policy of spurning such musicians because Gabriel was foundational to my prog-rock education and because the release of this record was truly an event.  But no more, unless he reverses his stance.    A

Sample song  “Love Can Heal”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us5JFGeKRQo

And the rest . . . 

 

ALTIN GÜN, Aşk (ATO Records/Glitterbeat Records)—Said (by an unnamed Bandcamp writer) to be a return to the Anatolian folk rock of the Dutch band’s first two records, On (2018) and Gece (2019), Aşk (Passion or Romance) is to my ears tamer than its glittering, synth-heavy predecessor, Yol, which was my Album of the Year for 2021.  Sporting a somewhat different lineup from the prior record, with bassist Jasper Verhulst and the two singers of Turkish origin, Erdinç Ecevit and Merve Daşdemir, as the constants, Altın Gün also adjusted its approach to suit the looser post-pandemic era by recording these ten songs live in studio rather than by exchanging tracks recorded individually at home.  As with Yol, most of the songs are souped-up modern renditions of traditional Turkish music, too old to be credited to any source.  The closer, “Doktor Civanım,” is restrained, swirly Euro-disco with cheesy synth accompaniment, sung by Daşdemir (the chorus is sung; the verse is spoken), intended as a tribute to the sacrifices of all the health care workers during the pandemic.  It takes its title from a movie released at least twice, apparently, in Turkey, in the mid-1970s and again in the early 1980s, about an Istanbul doctor who returns to his village to provide free care; the song lyrics are attributed to twentieth-century musician Ahmet Gazi Ayhan, but the music is original to the band.  The song preceding it, the otherworldly “Güzelliğin On Para Etmez” (Your Beauty Would Not Have Been Worth a Cent), sung piercingly by Ecevit (the male and female vocalists alternate songs), was written by Aşık Veysel, another twentieth-century songwriter/bard who also had a song adaptation on Yol.  And “Leylim Ley,” described as a “song of love and exile” by publicist Beth Cavanagh, portrayed here as an acidic slow burn, came from the poet/writer/composer/film director Zülfü Livaneli, whose soundtrack credits include one for the movie Yol (The Path, 1982), and lyricist Sabahattin Ali.  The song most similar to Yol the album, and therefore my favorite, is the opener, “Badi Sabah Olmadan” (roughly, Before Dawn), which appeared in a different guise on the band’s other 2021 release, Âlem.  It is brash and upbeat, with a psychedelic/modal groove, ominous-sounding lyrics warbled by Ecevit, a yowling bridge from guitarist Thijs Elzinga, and crashing percussive attacks, and you can really move to it.  The remainder of the tracklist is, if not always slower, definitely quieter and sparser in arrangements.  “Su Sızıyor” (Water Is Leaking), the following song, has plaintive vocals from Daşdemir and a burbling, slow-funk accompaniment.  Both of the first two selections are spiced by Ecevit’s baglama, or saz.  A couple of tunes, “Dere Geliyor” (Here Comes the River) and the aforementioned “Güzelliğin On Para Etmez,” which has the most intriguing and dreamy orchestrations of any on the record, make use of the pedal steel guitar (Elzinga again), for a weirdly Chris Isaak–like effect.  “Çıt Çıt Çedene” (Crack, Crack the Hemp Seed) is not the first psych-rock reworking of this folk song; that came from Baris Manço in the seventies.  “Rakiya Su Katamam” (I Cannot Dilute Raki with Water) is another modal melody sung in subdued fashion by Daşdemir, but the wailing guitar improvisation at its center, full of wah-wah effects, really makes the song.  “Kalk Gidelim” (Get Up and Let’s Go) is the most relaxed tune, even while seductively insistent (the more active bridge section almost seems superfluous), while “Canim Oy” (I could not find an adequate translation for this) has a couple of heavily percussive stomp sessions as it proceeds.  The performances by Altın Gün are always a pleasure, but I still favor the highly energized, electronic offerings that predominated on Yol.  Further, it is not an encouraging sign that Daşdemir announced in February 2024 that she was leaving to pursue a solo career; how will the group fare without their charismatic female lead?    A/A-

Sample song  “Doktor Civanım”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzFeoiScuzo
 

 

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, Isn’t It Now? (Domino Recording Co.)—As with Metric’s album Formentera II (see below), this record seems to comprise the leavings of the previous year’s release, Time Skiffs (see the 2022 music survey). As is the case with Metric, the earlier album is far superior.  Isn’t It Now? used material that the band found better suited to live performance and improvisation, but it does not translate well to a studio recording.  It is agonizingly slow, prolix, tumescent.  Makes me think of some of those avant jazz albums from the sixties in which nothing much happens but suspended passages of quiet interrupted by dull instrumental rumblings or an attenuated xylophone or vibraphone run.  It is also strangely enervated, drained of the joy and childlike wonder that used to characterize Animal Collective.  Even their delightfully silly performing monikers are missing from the printed credits.  These guys are middle-aged now, live in scattered places, and have other responsibilities, but could they now be taking themselves too seriously?  The more gravitas-inclined Animal Collective worked for songs like “Prester John” and “Cherokee” from the prior record; not so much here.  The centerpiece of the disc is the massive, 22-minute-long “Defeat.”  That I am unsure why it even bears that title shows how muddled the message is.  As a prog rock fan, I am no stranger to songs exceeding twenty minutes in length, but Yes and Genesis had far more going on in theirs.  “Defeat” is roughly divided into three unequal parts:  the first and third have no beat; the shorter, livelier, singsong second section, beginning with “Crawling from the serpent in the water,” does, along with celeste from Deakin (Josh Dibb).  The first section’s vocals float above a low drone, ethereal synthesizer ornamentation, and intermittent drumrolls.  The final section, which is half the composition, is both turgid, engineered at times to sound as if emanating from submerged instruments, and spacy, with sluggish pacing that would make Sigur Rós (see below) proud.  Toward the end, the singer asks multiple times the question that gives the album its title—with the same partially soothing reply, “Defeat/oh no, not now.”  “Defeat” is not the only song that taxes the listener’s patience:  “Genie’s Open” begins unfussily, with a lilting 6/8 meter and the buzz of the hurdy-gurdy from Geologist (Brian Weitz), and I like the bassoon accompaniment from Sara Schoenbeck.  But the “sea of light” chorus that follows (the principal vocalists are Avey Tare [Dave Portner] and Panda Bear [Noah Lennox]) and goes on for several minutes is not nearly as enchanting as its authors appear to believe.  “Stride Rite,” named for a kids’ shoe store chain, strives for tunefulness but ends up far more wan and downbeat than its title would suggest.  “Soul Capturer,” the wry, folky opening track, is a more conventional Animal Collective song, amiably cute, silly, gently yearning, ending with a facsimile of an aboriginal hum.  Several tunes carry Caribbean inflections:  “Broke Zodiac” (a Jimmy Buffett, “Margaritaville” [1977] vibe), “Gem & I,” a sashaying little tune with marimba-like percussion, and the closer, “King’s Walk.”  This last consists almost solely of repeatedly chanting, a calypso-style call and response minus the response, several lines about the ecological catastrophe we face, while leaving some opening for hope.  “Magicians from Baltimore” is a backhanded tribute to the musicians’ hometown.  I do not think that Visit Baltimore, the city’s tourist bureau, will be using it anytime soon in promotions.  It is fascinating in its way, if disjointed, appropriately occult with dark tones and sudden percussion attacks from Panda Bear.  When it gets into the declarative final section, “…in Baltimore/Where it gets hot on the magnolia,” heavily percussive with bittersweet ivory-tickling accompaniment, it becomes that rare refrain you could sing along to, a broken barroom lament of sorts.  Isn’t It Now is not devoid of interest, but give me the old, playful Animal Collective any day—I could watch the “Brother Sport” (2009) video on repeat for ages.    B/B-

Sample song  “Broke Zodiac”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIdi4LeSrc
 

 

BDRMM, I Don’t Know (Rock Action Records)—The second album from Bdrmm (pronounced “Bedroom,” as in the title of their debut record; see the 2020 music survey) is all about turning inward and examining personal shortcomings and interpersonal breakdowns.  Sounds a little gloomier than it actually is, and in any case, I refuse to attach much weight to lead singer Ryan Smith’s sparse, less than illuminating lyrics and pandemic-era brooding.  The music is the draw, and these four practitioners of shoegaze (or, as they might style it, shgzz) from Hull, England, have broadened their ambitions and range of instruments since the debut to incorporate electronic keyboards and other technical wizardry.  Recording on the Scottish “post-rock” band Mogwai’s Rock Action Records label, Smith and his mates—brother Jordan Smith on bass, Joe Vickers on lead guitar, and Conor Murray on drums, with synths, sampling, and other programming shared between the brothers—do not waste any time letting their fans know about the shift toward electronica.  The first (nearly) three minutes of the opener, “Alps,” are a wash of cycling ambient electronics, drum programming, and synths, before the downcast vocal, breathy and tremulous, kicks in.  At times, I have reservations about the androgyny of Ryan Smith’s voice, but it is fit to purpose for this kind of music.  The atmosphere might be eerily dystopian, but the music shines with a Blade Runner kind of garish, plastic-wrapped beauty.  “Be Careful” may be as thematically dark, but it beckons toward the pop end of the rock spectrum, with an easy swing, conventional song structure, and, for shoegazers, an unusual clarity of tone—nicely put together, boys!  A similar inclination drives “We Fall Apart,” a tune with minimal variation but one that is ear-friendly and accented with splendidly evocative (think, the Moody Blues or the Who’s “I Can See for Miles”) harmonics at the chorus.  An instrumental bridge is followed by the strangely undermiked recitation by Ashley Carmichael of a poem written by him, set to the same rhythms and arrangements.  The swoony-toned “Pulling Stitches,” the most prototypically shoegazing song on the album, is also the one strong enough to qualify as a single; its grimy, crepuscular swirl of morose, dorm-room-philosophy speculation can hold its own against the likes of DIIV, Alcest, or Slowdive.  “Advertisement One” is a lovely, harmonically sophisticated, and deftly orchestrated quasi-instrumental for piano, synths, percussion, and faintly sketched choral long tones written by Jordan Smith.  There is a stark mismatch between the powerful drilling of the guitars in “It’s Just a Bit of Blood” and the wan vocal.  The rat-a-tat thundering at the outset builds expectations for more than the song can deliver, and I found myself impatient for its return during the sung passages.  Even the weaker chanted themes, however, float on a cushion of wonderfully airy arrangements, including, in the case of “Hidden Cinema,” some Indian-style percussion among the percolating synths.  The only composition that loses its way is “A Final Movement,” too drawn-out at more than eight minutes, too maundering, notwithstanding another glittering orchestral underpinning to its earnest but stagnant vocal line.  In all, though, the group has adjusted well to its new direction and identity.  Bdrmm sms to be httngg its strdd wth I Don’t Know.    A-

Sample song  “Pulling Stitches”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr5-ZUS4u9s
 

 

THE BEACHES, Blame My Ex (The Beaches/FACTOR)—What does it say about the Polaris Music Prize that this collection of serviceable, generally second-tier, postpunk-inflected rock songs was shortlisted for the award?  Mainly that Canada, demographically speaking, is a small-ish country whose Anglophone media is Toronto-centric.  Named after the lakefront Toronto neighborhood where three-quarters of the foursome grew up (and not to be confused with the similarly named, similarly all-female five-piece band from Melbourne, Australia), the Beaches blew up when a clip of lead singer Jordan Miller singing the vocal to “Blame Brett” became massively viewed on TikTok.  The song’s popularity led to some blowback for Brett Emmons, the singer/guitarist of the Glorious Sons, a Kingston, Ontario, band, and Miller’s ex of the album and song title.  But Miller insisted that fans were misconstruing the lyrics, which are more self-critical than deflecting blame onto him.  The song, generating sheer heat, is in attitude and tone like something from the Taylor Swift catalogue, if Swift were interested in guitar-and-drum rock rather than bubblegum fare to sate her masses of admirers.  Subtlety is not on the menu for the world-weary “Everything Is Boring.”  Even if leavened with a bit of self-mockery, the song is a caustic, clarion broadside, suited to Miller’s pipes, which are strong but not terribly supple.  A few tracks such as the fingernail-chewing “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Paranoid” and the lilting but still powerful (notwithstanding the narrator’s quandary of romantic confusion) “Edge of the Earth” are slower paced and more introspective, but for the most part the Beaches are offering punchy pop with bass licks (Leandra Earl) that cultivate a cool vibe like the early Cure records or Dry Cleaning (see the 2021 and 2022 music surveys) and a wry take on breakups and single femalehood.  While “Blame Brett” references a heterosexual relationship, other songs are more ambiguous, and in the case of “Edge of the Earth” and “Cigarette,” the object of desire is clearly another woman.  Although “It’s raining, it’s pouring/Everything is boring” will not win any prizes, there are some clever lyrics:  “Alphabet soup spelt ‘you’re a fool’/But I still ate it all the same,” for instance, from the shoegaze-style “Shower Beer.”  In “Kismet,” the most dynamic and skillfully enjoyable throwback rocker on the record, with a glistening bridge, the words are firmly tongue in cheek, as the singer projects a match made in heaven based on chance encounters and superficial similarities in taste.  For “My Body Ft. Your Lips,” the band teams up with Beach Weather, an all-male group from the Boston area, for a strange, throbbing tune that starts with the woman tired of love games and the man (Nick Santino) creepily voyeuristic yet ends with both singing, “I wanna be your bitch.”  The most earnest breakup song, “If a Tree Falls,” extends its refrain from the title with “I don’t want to hear it,” wallowing in denial, regret, and withdrawal, with a pained, Chris Isaak–bluesy melody to match, ending in screeching guitar overtones.  “Me & Me,” a tune that tries hard to justify enjoying going out on the town as a singleton, deploys a seldom-used device in rock music, an accelerando near the beginning; the remainder is more breezy than beguiling.  “Cigarette,” the closer, is tight, punky “pop rocks” shoegaze yet undistinguished because it barely ventures off the three-chord structure that powers its rhythm.  Blame My Ex is a primal scream of a record but breezes by too quickly for a more moving expression of the pain it depicts.    B+

Sample song  “Blame Brett”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2kUX_Fmj7k
 

 

BLONDSHELL, Blondshell (Partisan Records/Knitting Factory Records)—I would not say that I was bowled over by the self-titled release from Blondshell, but it is an impressive debut all the same.  Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum, Los Angeles–based, NYC-born and -raised, channeled her anger and frustrations as a twenty-something trying to break out in this fragmented and confused culture into nine short-ish songs.  Mostly, the themes are about the psychic perils of trying to connect with others, either romantically or otherwise:  guys are jerks, without finesse or consideration; I am not sure how I feel about him even though we made out, etc.—very much a young person’s concerns.  Since the record company provides no credits, either on the CD jacket or its website, it cannot be said whether Teitelbaum, as Blondshell, plays all instruments on the record; clearly, when she goes on tour, she has guitarists backing her up.  The power pop numbers work best, which explains why the latter half of the tracklist is a modest letdown.  The transitional song is “Sepsis”; it has the turbocharged guitar chorus typical of earlier songs on the record, but yoked to an almost country-ish ballad that has more slack in its rope than what came before it.  “Sober Together” is dreamy and a bit bluesy, with an ethereal hummed intro that casts back to one of the more contemplative songs on the first Brazilian Girls record (2005).  Here, Teitelbaum uses her voice to good advantage; the same cannot be said for the closing number, “Dangerous.”  Her vocal instrument serves well for her typical repertoire, but she is no diva, and so “Dangerous,” a slow piece with only light guitar accompaniment, exposes the lack of full body in her voice, particularly in the upper register, as she strives to carry a real (if drowsy and less than brilliant) tune.  “Joiner” has been likened to Courtney Barnett but lacks the Aussie singer’s wry humor and keen power of observation; its verse tries too hard for a gritty, cinéma vérité style (drawing on the artist’s own addiction struggles) that pairs poorly with an insipidly aspirational refrain.  As a return to the loud guitars of the album’s first half, “Tarmac” would be more refreshing were not its tonal range so limited; for all the emotion Blondshell packs in, it is the aural equivalent of a daguerreotype.  The most dynamic song carries an innocuous title.  “Salad” smolders with murderous revenge fantasy, but in a way that co-opts the traditional male avenger role, drawing on a century’s worth of lurid Hollywood plots.  But it is the music that is most gripping, the dire bass ostinato exploding into a muscular guitar efflorescence at the chorus.  The song reaches a peak of intensity with the outburst “Cause we [meaning women] were never violent,” at which point it pulls back for a bridge of high piano keys and acoustic guitar strumming before the electric instruments return for a finale.  The best constructed of the slower tunes is “Olympus,” yielding another perspective on addiction, a snapshot of Americana in dark tones, a soul-baring and chromatically sophisticated composition.  The opener, “Veronica Mars,” named for a television character who is a teen detective, is mere appetizer, but what a delectable morsel!  There is something of early Blur in its freewheeling sense of play—from bass pounding the same note under the sung theme at the outset to a frenzied mosh of guitar pyrotechnics.  “Kiss City,” another short one, has a relaxed tempo, but the dynamics and arrangements go abruptly from soft and light to shouty and blaring.  As long as Teitelbaum plays to her strengths, Blondshell provides as convincing an example of a solo female rocker as any I have come across lately.        A-

Sample song  “Veronica Mars”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TAPFUrk-nw

 

THE CLIENTELE, I Am Not There Anymore (Merge Records)—Is I Am Not There Anymore a work of extraordinary pop genius, or is it bloated, pompous, even a bit twee?  This is not a binary choice, but the album is in some ways hard to parse.  Kudos to the Clientele, a band that has been around in one way or another since the early nineties, though their first studio recording release was in 2000, for originality and for doggedly sticking to a singular vision.  Not a concept album, still, I Am Not There Anymore has a numbering of recurring themes and notions, for example, citing an outbreak of wildfires that occurred on August 15 (of some indeterminate year).  At the same time, a number of the compositions are unusually knotty, for pop music, perhaps longer and more complicated than they really needed to be.  Further, certain subthemes and countermelodies appear to be written in a deliberately tuneless fashion, not atonal but “a-tune-al.”  Strings (the component players of a string quartet) plus horn and trumpet accompany some of the music, giving it the plush, chamber feel of a Moody Blues or Electric Light Orchestra record.  Alasdair MacLean’s tenor is hardly operatic quality, yet its folky gentility and warmth beckon toward earlier English artists like Cat Stevens or Nick Drake.  “My Childhood,” a set of reminiscences read by guest artist Jessica Griffin, the lead singer of a group called Would-Be-Goods, approaches art song (without any actual singing), as strings scurry, bay, and squeal like car horns stuck in traffic.  It is reprised in the final number, “The Village Is Always on Fire,” this time with a low thrum, percussion, and sampled voices in the background, ending with a somber string theme.  Similarly, Griffin reads the work of various writers including Rudyard Kipling to the keyboard arpeggios and soft string orchestration in “Conjuring Summer In.”  The longest entry on this very long album (playing for more than 63 minutes) is the one that kicks things off:  “Fables of the Silverlink.”  Whereas most pop songs have an A-B-A-B-[bridge]-A-B-type structure, this eight-minute piece is more like A through G or H, without revisiting earlier sections (though the opening cello run and one particular muted-color guitar rumination recur).  The B section is the first one that trips up the listener by eschewing “tune-ality” in favor of something blankly beige.  Subsequent sections at least gesture toward conventional pitch progression, yet there might be a half-dozen different key signatures across the length of “Fables of the Silverlink,” plus a slowdown in meter in the final eighth.  One might term this song a medley, except that the component parts are too disjointed.  At one point, we hear Alicia Macanás singing a few modal verses in Spanish, poetic but unconnected to anything else.  The string arrangements are lovely throughout, at least.  “Hey Siobhan” is far shorter but wanders all over the place in terms of key and motif, whereas “Chalk Flowers” is, notwithstanding the progressive rock imagery in some of the lyrics, all verse and no chorus at all.  The strings and guitar intro to “Garden Eye Mantra” is slow and sensuously stirring, making the pallid sung verse that follows a letdown.  The song ends with an odd, monklike chanting of a quatrain several times (“out in the dark, the hatchbacks are rolling…”) over a buzzy bass drone.  For reasons clear only to the band, the same quatrain recurs at the end of “I Dreamed of You, Maria,” this time with a less monochrome delivery and trumpet and string accompaniment.  MacLean’s vocal delivery on this reflective and mellow, wayward tune (the third time we have heard about this mysterious Maria on the record) is remarkably similar to that of Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs.  “Dying in May” begins with a crisp drumbeat, followed by a pleadingly insistent melody feverishly digging up recollections of lost children and being in the house of an aunt and uncle; for once, the band is concentrated and effective.  A quasi–bossa nova beat pulls along “Claire’s Not Real,” one of several songs whose nondescript verse section blossoms into a shapely chorus (viz. “Stems of Anise,” “Through the Roses”).  Of the shorter pieces on the disc, there are four “Radials,” which are generally too fragmentary to say much about.  But “Segue 4 (IV)” is an interesting snippet sampling nature sounds and a soprano as well as children’s voices, a bit of keyboard, and bass strings.  This interlude is in the mold of the fleeting vignettes of Broadcast or the Focus Group, but nothing else on the album is.  The most ingratiatingly songful offerings are “Blue over Blue” (clearly meant to be the lead single), a gentle lay with fingerstyle picking of the guitar strings so that it sounds like a lute, and “Lady Grey.”  Even “Lady Grey,” though, contains a tonally meandering countermelody, setting up a sense of relief when the original tune returns.  I Am Not There Anymore continually puts forth inventive passages and arrangements, reasons to be excited about the Clientele, and there are as many richly developed melodic nuggets as there are dull, ineffectual fragments, like introns in genetic code—yet seldom has an album called out as much for a song editor, to cut things down, hone the focus, and play to MacLean’s vocal strengths.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Blue over Blue”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-YpCcy05OA

 

FEIST, Multitudes (Polydor/Universal Music)—It may well be because I am not a big fan of the folk genre, but I still feel that Feist’s first solo album, the more pop-oriented Let It Die (2004), was her best.  Since then (see the 2007, 2011, and 2017 music surveys), it has been a gradual but steady decline in quality.  That trend does not continue with Multitudes; even so, I find it hard to muster enthusiasm for her latest.  It would be a stretch to call this an acoustic album, as there are electronic touches even in the sparest songs, yet it does have an acoustic feel to it, with the exception of a couple of noisier tracks, which are, not incidentally, the most interesting and rewarding.  The opener, “The Lightning,” bursts forth with a clatter of percussion and Leslie Feist’s multitracked voice, which alternates with a softer sequence carrying the melody over sustained keyboard tones, in which the drum pattern is sublimated.  There is even a searing power-guitar bridge played by Feist herself, like one of AC/DC’s “Scottishy” riffs.  Just as the song seems to be generating momentum toward a climax, it dies away inconclusively in an upward sweep of quiet hoots—fascinating, as Mr. Spock would say on Star Trek.  With “Borrow Trouble,” Feist returns to her Broken Social Scene roots in Toronto; the song begins and ends with a muddy instrumental blare characteristic of some of that collective’s rowdier work.  As in “The Lightning,” the blare quickly returns in sublimated form following the exposition of the anthemic theme.  Co-written by fellow Canadian producer and composer Mocky (Dominic Salole), it is the strongest composition on the record, full of conviction and brio.  At one stage, a raucous, sour-toned saxophone solo from David Ralicke substitutes for the expected reiteration of the chours.  By the end of the song, the singer is shouting “Trouble!” against her own subharmonic accompaniment.  The cushiony reverb and other electric instrumentation elevate the otherwise pedestrian and bemusing “I Took All of My Rings Off”—if the song’s symbolism is about leaving the past behind by burying all one’s jewelry, why reverse course at the end?  The multilayered voices (all Feist’s) in “Become the Earth” grow incantatory as they intensify, giving that song its own heft and dreamy atmospherics.  “Calling All the Gods” is a nice, if wispy, choral arrangement combining Feist’s voice with that of LIP TALK (Sarah K Pedinotti), lifting lines from the Odyssey, with the verse interspersing childhood and adult observations about the strangers we encounter.  “Hiding Out in the Open” is a pretty little number.  For the most part, the other tracks have a true compositional integrity on their own terms (some tunes fall into a rut of predictability, viz. “Martyr Moves”); they just strike me as a little dull.  This record was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, but the attendant respect does not mean I will abandon hope for something from Feist that channels her inner diva more than her Bob Dylan or Bruce Cockburn.    B+

Sample song  “Borrow Trouble”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVx9TLR3XH0

ALISON GOLDFRAPP, The Love Invention (Skint/BMG)—Truly a labor (or, as the Brits spell it, “labour”) of love, The Love Invention is Alison Goldfrapp’s (in her own words) “tribute to the dance floor.”  It is a departure in the sense that this is the first record she put out under her full name, rather than as part of the electropop duo Goldfrapp with erstwhile partner Will Gregory (see the 2010 and 2017 music surveys).  At the same time, not a departure at all since the duo were always purveyors, first and foremost, of dance-oriented pop, with a latex sheen and plenty of electronic effects.  All the tracks on the new disc are well crafted, and still, none really scores big.  The experimentalism that characterized the last Goldfrapp disc, Silver Eye (2017), is not much in evidence here.  Alison Goldfrapp is working with a new set of producers, principally Richard X (Richard Philips) and James Greenwood, but also Toby Scott, Paul Woolford, and Claptone, and it is never clear from the skinchy credits who is responsible for the instrumentation (largely synthesizers), except for Scott playing keyboards on “In Electric Blue.”  The rare departures from club-friendly beats are successful forays onto the turf of dream pop, shimmery, sighing, full of reverb, namely, “Subterfuge” and the finale, “Sloflo.”  Neither has more than a truncated melody, but “Sloflo” better displays the breathy, drowsy/sexy aspects of Goldfrapp’s malleable vocal talents.  “The Beat Divine,” its title notwithstanding, slows things down a bit, surrendering to rubbery rhythms as the singer moans and suspires her way to an ecstasy (as much spiritual as carnal) that takes no back seat to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” from 1977.  Midtempo as well, “Hotel (Suite 23)” calls forth plenty of one-night-stand imagery yet feels more sanitized and aspirational (“I only dream this dream with you”), the Reeperbahn of red-light districts, than steamy or louche.  The opener, “Neverstop,” employs the device of a (male-voiced) therapist asking the singer to open up about herself; fortunately, this artifice is not too intrusive.  Goldfrapp’s response is limited in both range and descriptive power, too pat to be poetic, as infectious as the beat may be.  “Gatto Gelato” is playful and scores high on the energy scale while otherwise taking shape as a kind of music box sold only in a store run jointly (somehow) by Giorgio Moroder and Hugh Hefner in the seventies.  The quasi–title track makes the best case for the record; the introductory couplet, “Knock knock Dr. What?  Is this real or not?” has a certain funkiness, backed by a springy, motoric keyboard, under the guidance of the two primary producers, that lifts it out of the realm of the ordinary.  “Fever” also skillfully raises the temperature and intensity in service of passion.  Even in these instances, though, there is a certain made-to-order quality to the dance pop.  For all Goldfrapp’s swoony susurrations over the course of forty-seven minutes, for an album whose themes are love and desire, a number of the songs are too mechanistic and synthetic to penetrate the heart; it is like your digital assistant, Siri or Cortana, trying to come on to you.    B+

Sample song  “Love Invention”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYkFBecIGRo

 

ROBYN HITCHCOCK, Life after Infinity (Tiny Ghost Records)—On March 3, 1953 (two days before Sergei Prokofiev, and Stalin, died), Robyn Hitchcock was born in Paddington.  Seventy years and several weeks later, he released his first-ever all-instrumental album, Life after Infinity, on his own Tiny Ghost label.  Although Hitchcock has been living in Nashville for close to a decade, the album was produced back home, in Hitchcock’s own Tubby Towers studio in London and at his confederate Charlie Francis’s Stwdio Penty in Cardiff.  Francis, in addition to co-producing and mixing/mastering the disc, plays bass guitar and percussion.  Everything else is Hitchcock, which mostly means acoustic guitar but also electric guitars and other instruments.  There is enough stylistic variety on the new album to keep the mind from wandering, and the background settings for some songs create a mood that can only be described as Hitchcockian, for a man who mastered solo artistry some four decades ago, after leaving the Soft Boys.  With his voice (always more about character than quality) and lyrics that are surrealistic (he is a former art student), droll, and at times grotesque taken away, the focus is naturally on his string-picking talents.  Hitchcock and Francis form a tightly bonded pair, as the accompanist is careful never to steal the limelight.  Often Francis’s part becomes a ground bass (ostinato) for Hitchcock’s soloing; this is evident from the outset, with “The Eyes in the Vase,” which is transcendent but almost threatens to take flight as “Norwegian Wood” (1965) near the finish.  At intervals, the two strummers achieve an almost polyphonic density, as toward the close of “Nasturtiums for Anita.”  Certain songs (“Daphne Skipping,” “Mr. Ringerson’s Picnic”) have an ambling English joviality to them, though it is never that simple; others show the influence of Indian ragas that Hitchcock has been experimenting with since Globe of Frogs (1988).  “Plesiosaurs in the Desert,” one of the more fanciful tunes, is one such Indian-inspired composition, with the reverberant production effects creating a background evoking sweeping, arid landscapes.  In contrast, the tremolo-laden “Gliding above the Ruins” is quasi-pentatonic.  Roots rock makes its way into “Tubby among the Nightingales” and “Veronica’s Chapel,” the latter accompanied by church bells intermittently.  The duo produce Spanish-style, tear-welling sentiment in “Celestial Transgression,” whose fading chords recall the end of the title track of I Often Dream of Trains (1984).  One could make the case that nothing Hitchcock has done in the past quarter-century has been particularly consequential, compared with his earlier work in both band settings and alone.  On the other hand, he continues to be prolific and to explore new concepts, and, as a sheer entertainer, he never disappoints.    A-

Sample song  “Celestial Transgression”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlsyCHN8Ic

 

M83, Fantasy (Mute Records)—A soufflé that is by turns cheesy, unsavory, and sublime, Fantasy takes inspiration from earlier generations of musicians, like Yes and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (see below).  The comparison flatters Anthony Gonzalez and his producer, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, since their musical forebears would never have tolerated the quantity of fluff or dreck that is found on this record.  Even so, Gonzalez and Meldal-Johnsen, along with keyboard player and saxophonist Joe Berry, have a refined ear for what sounds great multitracked, and there is a particularly French (Gonzalez is from Antibes originally) fearlessness about cornball sentiments or compositional schmaltz that I find admirable in its way.  When they hit their marks, the results are effervescent.  The title track is dream pop of the highest order, dance friendly, glittery without glitz, full of burbling scat that skirts the edge of pastiche, with chord changes that instantly shift the tune’s color and mood and nice touches like the bit of South American pan flute band—no more than a couple of measures—sneaked in shortly past the intro.  The instrumental opener, “Water Deep,” manages to be serene and also glowingly warm and atmospheric, like watching the sun rise through morning haze.  It segues into “Oceans Niagara,” a quasi-instrumental whose only lyric (“Beyond Adventure!”) is sung by Gonzalez in a tone that is a doppelganger for Jon Anderson, the former lead singer of Yes.  That is not the only bit of homage:  the high-toned synthesizer riff toward the end seems a nod to keyboard virtuoso and fellow Yes alum Rick Wakeman.  Otherwise, the piece is more akin to shoegaze bands or U2, full of ringing guitar tones, reveling in such ecstasy that it matters little that there is zero development beyond the initial exposition.  “Kool Nuit,” one of the longer (around eight minutes) pieces on this very long (more than 66 minutes) album, proceeds from a synthesizer chorale in suspended time to the sort of breathy, silvered soprano favored by Gonzalez among his female guest vocalists, the syrupy verses nicely delivered by Kaela Sinclair.  The longer second section of the song does have a beat, which percolates as the chord cycle takes on a vaguely modal quality, capped off by a smattering of lyric sung jointly by Gonzalez and Sinclair, making for one of the disc’s more convincing tracks.  Another long one is “Earth to Sea,” not as distinctive but breezy, ethereal, and life affirming all the same.  “Sunny Boy” is a song I would love to hate (what lyric could be dopier than “Is she the girl called Sunny Boy?”), but it is just too darned peppy.  Its over-the-top choruses have a way of burrowing under your skin, and the semi-shrill synth opening recalls the free-form Moog outro from Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man” (1970).  Other songs such as “Us and the Rest” (limpid piano chords at the close), “Radar, Far, Gone,” and “Deceiver” (those Genesis Trick of the Tail–era [1976] sonorities at the outset give way to a limp refrain), have affecting passages, particularly when themes billow or morph into something new, but the listener must wade through a shallow sea of aromatic, soundtrack-aspirational bilge to reach them.  “Laura” is just sticky toffee, melding some of the worst aspects of 1970s and 1980s pop, and “Amnesia,” strident but with an embryonic rather than full fleshed melody, never really takes off.  The album ends with the horridly titled “Dismemberment Bureau,” serene in its falsettos and processional, computer-generated cherub choruses, as the sun goes down on this particular Fantasy.  Gonzalez and his partners are still masters of sonic collage, yet I wonder if they ever again can find the focus to make a singularly great album, as with Saturdays = Youth (see the 2008 music survey) or Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (see the 2011 music survey).    B+

Sample song  “Oceans Niagara”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryFV9dORPPw
 

MATMOS, Return to Archive (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)—For the seventy-fifth anniversary of Folkways Records, which in 1987 became part of Smithsonian Folkways, the record label of the Smithsonian Institution, its marketing manager asked the duo who make up Matmos, Martin (M. C.) Schmidt and Drew Daniel, if they would create a new electronic album based on material from its extensive archives, and they agreed.  In the end, they decided not to add any of their own sounds to those on the Smithsonian’s own LPs but rather to serve as sound collagists and editors.  In this regard, Matmos was acting even more conservatively than it did with Ultimate Care II (see the 2016 music survey), which used sounds generated by the pair’s home washing machine but embellished it by beating it with sticks, etc.  The duo settled on around forty recordings, stretching from 1950, when Emory Cook’s Cook Laboratories first published Sound Effects, Vol. 1: For Amateur Theatrical and Motion Pictures, to 1973 (Sounds and the Ultra-Sounds of the Bottle-Nose Dolphin), focusing on a small number of these in particular.  While they were faithful to the recordings, their manipulations extended beyond cutting and pasting and juxtaposition.  They used noise reduction software to improve the quality of low-fidelity recordings, or to make the hisses and humming still worse when that seemed the more interesting choice.  In a couple of instances, they asked outside experimental soundsmiths, Evicshen (Victoria Shen) and Aaron Dilloway, to play around with the Smithsonian recordings Speech after Removal of the Larynx and The Sounds of the Junk Yard (both from 1964), respectively, and then reworked the material transformed by these artists to suit their own purposes.  So how did it turn out?  Certain passages sound genuinely musical, as if percussion and other instrumentation had been added (in fact, there are human voices on some of the recordings and a handful of instruments in The Science of Sound [1958] that show up on the fourth track, “Music or Noise?”).  At other times, the listener might feel it is just a sequence of sound effects, interesting in and of themselves but otherwise not demonstrative of any audible artistry.  On the longest track by far, the title track, there are intervals during its first half when the sounds sampled are not even all that fetching—a little bit of car/truck traffic stopping at toll booths goes a long way.  “Return to Archive” leans heavily on Sound Effects, Vol. 1 but is Schmidt’s compilation of ten sounds from five sources.  Insect sounds at the start are interrupted by repeated pistol shots; in the second half, following noises made by propeller aircraft and the highway racket, the insects return, succeeded by an insistent doorbell and a voice that says, “Mark 9:47,” which is updated three minutes later (after a disquisition on frogs by a noted herpetologist, Charles M. Bogert, processed and distorted) to “Mark 9:50.”  “Injection Basic Sound” is described in the extensive CD booklet as multiple samplings “julienned into micro-slices whose order keeps cycling forward and backward rhythmically,” and indeed, there is a nice, rolling, busy buzz to the arrangement.  The following track, “Mud-Dauber Wasp,” is fascinating, as it is constructed entirely of a recording of the titular insect’s wingbeats, yet ends up being the coolest, weirdly “techno,” groove laid down on the disc; “The Way Japanese Beetles Sound to a Rose” is akin to this, though far briefer.  Because it samples actual string and percussion instruments (tuning forks, violin, harp, clavichord, xylophone), “Music or Noise?” puts a thumb on the scale in favor of the former, but it does become rather screechy in its midsection.  Similarly, “Lend Me Your Ears” draws on actual singing and piano accompaniment, but instead of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” (1967), we get a snippet of a dire tune plus a selection of telecoms beeps and a smattering of dolphin squeals.  The final cut, “Going to Sleep,” starts with what sounds like monkey chatter but is actually the mating call of the lyrebird, then draws its core from the Relaxation Record (1962), in which Milton Feher’s emollient voice would induce somnolence even were he not giving instructions on how to release tension at bedtime.  (Never mind the harbor sounds midstream, which would seem to disturb the pattern.)  It closes with some ethereal tones and grinding sounds generated by Dilloway out of the junkyard record.  The album is droll at times, intentionally or not, as unexpected interjections and contrasts burst onto the scene.  “Music or Noise?” is not a question that can be answered objectively; that is up to listener perceptions.  Given its nature, it would be impossible to say that Return to Archive is the most creative of recent Matmos albums; my money is still on Plastic Anniversary (see the 2019 music survey), but the group never fails to find interesting subjects for exploration.    A-

Sample song  “Why?” (featuring Evicshen):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3x7vOWBjE4
 

METRIC, Formentera II (Metric Music International/Thirty Tigers)—One cannot help thinking that the nine tracks that constitute Formentera II are the leftovers, the ones that did not make the cut for the previous year’s well-regarded Formentera (see the 2022 music survey).  In spite of this, there are a few songs to take notice of because they defy the cookie-cutter pattern that characterizes several others (I am looking at you, “Detour Up,” “Days of Oblivion,” “Nothing Is Perfect”).  Of these, “Suckers” is the most absorbing, with a sighing, baleful guitar and sung theme vaguely reminiscent of Chicago’s “Wishing You Were Here” (1974).  Midway through, it morphs into a slower groove but remains as piercing via unexpected chromatic turns of phrase.  The reflective “Stone Window” has the kind of loping stride that typifies many Metric compositions, but the chorus brings chiming electric guitars into the equation, becoming a yowl of strings at the bridge, and lead singer Emily Haines follows suit the rest of the way through—what had been a light romp becomes power pop.  “Descendants” surmounts a ho-hum minor-mode beginning through abrupt changes, first in rhythm, then in tone, brightening out of nowhere before repeating the whole cycle—the choices are strange from a compositional standpoint, but it is one way to keep the ear attuned.  “Just the Once,” a song that Haines described as “regret disco” because of lyrics that wonder about the danger that doing something one time that might trigger remorse could become habitual, is snappy and smart, its refrain ending in a monotone triplet, if hardly one of Metric’s most original creations.  Euphonious but phlegmatic, “Who Would You Be for Me” is a gelatinous, reverb-filled mass of thumbsucking in a romantic vein.  It is worth stressing that, even at its less inspired moments, the band is enjoyable thanks to its superb musicianship and Haines’s charisma at the microphone.  Metric completists will naturally want this record; everyone else ought to stick with the superior first Formentera.    B+/B

Sample song  “Just the Once”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYW4F5q7XBE
 

ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK, Bauhaus Staircase (White Noise Ltd./100% Records)—When groups that made their name in the eighties split (or suffer a near breakup) and then reconstitute themselves in the new millennium, the results are seldom worth celebrating.  I reviewed Depeche Mode’s Delta Machine (see the 2013 music survey) unfavorably, and I did not even want to touch Tears for Fears’ 2022 record, its first in almost two decades.  Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) was an electropop pioneer, and I would consider the first three albums (going by the American label releases), OMD, Architecture and Morality (both 1981), and Dazzle Ships (1983), to be “desert island” discs.  Then the band went more mainstream, had their one big success with “If You Leave” (1986), featured in the movie Pretty in Pink, and the rest is the sort of history not worth recounting.  The group, whose nucleus has remained remarkably constant over the years around the fulcrum of Andy McCluskey (vocals and bass guitar) and Paul Humphreys (vocals and keyboards), despite a period of dissolution from 1989 to 2006, has issued new records every several years since 2010.  Bauhaus Staircase was well received critically yet is less than deserving of the accolades.  It is glittery electronic music but no longer in the vanguard of any genre.  Rather, it sounds like the kind of bright dance pop you might hear anywhere.  OMD’s sentiments are in the right place, but, like much visual art these days, these are issued more as bald proclamations from a soapbox (viz. “Evolution of Species”) than with any subtlety or artifice.  On that score, the group does best with its showcase number, “Anthropocene,” the only track exceeding four minutes, and the snappy “Kleptocracy,” which dings Donald Trump and his enablers without actually naming them while perhaps veering too far toward the cynical, even in these sadly benighted times.  “Kleptocracy” comes across as smart, glib pop, like a Heaven 17 tune issued forty years late, with an oddly sunny tone and primitive melody, dispensed casually to work out your political frustrations while getting some exercise swaying your midsection.  “Anthropocene” is stagy by design, less a true song and more an artful musical setting for the voiceover dictionary definition of the title and periodic announcements of what the total human population was at varying degrees of magnitude ago, like something from Public Service Broadcasting (see the 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2021 music surveys), although there are four quatrains of sung verse as well.  Among the singles from the record, “Slow Train” is my favorite because it is the most playful, with Katrina Kanepe supplying background vocals, and it has the sexy, latex bodysuit feel of one of Goldfrapp’s vintage performance romps (see above for Alison Goldfrapp’s solo effort).  As such, it is a departure from the rest of the disc.  “Aphrodite’s Favourite Child” has some nice touches, such as the synthesized “heavenly choir” of the sort used for Genesis’s “Entangled” in 1976, and a rather more sophisticated song structure.  The title track, which kicks off the album, is silly, throwaway stuff (“I wanna kick down Fascist art”) with another very basic musical theme set to a buzzy beat.  The romantic selections, including the sedate, heartachy single “Veruschka,” are varying degrees of vapid, with gloppy melodies you are unlikely to recall.  Whether a group of guys who are reaching an age at which they qualify for U.K. Social Security benefits can come up with something truly dynamic and worth hearing is a question that remains sadly unanswered by Bauhaus Staircase.    B

Sample song  “Anthropocene”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QARnckI8Ny8
 

CAROLINE POLACHEK, Desire, I Want to Turn into You (Sony Records/Perpetual Novice)—It would be a stretch to characterize Caroline Polachek’s new disc as twelve studies into aspects of desire; it is not a concept album, after all.  Still, passion in its various guises serves well as an articulating framework.  Whether this is Polachek’s most fully realized work as a solo artist (she previously was a member of the Brooklyn duo/trio Chairlift) is not for me to say—aside from the final Chairlift record (see the 2016 music survey), I have previously been exposed only to her work with other performers, Blood Orange (see the 2013 music survey) and SBTRKT (see the 2014 music survey).  It does, though, display a musician confident in her powers.  Now in her late thirties, Polachek is one of the great voices of her generation, versatile, clarion or sultry when called for, full of verve and blue-eyed soul.  Whereas far too many performers use vocoders to mask their vocal deficiencies, Polachek deploys one the way some singers briefly jump into falsetto register, for emphasis.  Desire, I Want to Turn into You (a clunky title) actually starts off weakly and gathers momentum.  The opener, “Welcome to My Island,” was composed contemporaneously with her most recent record, Pang (2019).  It blooms  into a serviceable refrain, yet the verse is recited rather than sung, with dopey lyrics, in quasi-robotic fashion that induces the opposite of desire.  “Pretty in Possible” and “Bunny Is a Rider” lean heavily on recent trends in R&B production effects, the former with carefree schoolgirl humming ornamenting the song’s core and a chugging drumbeat, the latter slinky, with a cool-funk bass and trip-hop-inspired breakbeats and sampling from Polachek’s British co-songwriter and producer Danny L Harle.  While each shows off her adaptability to genre switching, they place a premium on slickness and deft execution; later tracks show more heart.  Starting with the flamenco-inspired “Sunset” (co-produced by Sega Bodega [Salvador Navarrete], who leads a trio of guitar accompanists), the thermostat is raised, yet even here the performance is briskly mechanistic; the main theme plays it safe.  The spectral, haunting “Crude Drawing of an Angel” is where the album truly begins to take off.  It reaches an apogee with “Fly to You,” which draws on the talents of three very different female vocalists/songwriters:  besides Polachek herself, Dido (Armstrong) and Grimes (Claire Elise Boucher).  Supported by more breakbeats and subtle guitar filigree, it is dream pop of the highest order, even if never elevated as a single.  By contrast, “Smoke,” which did get the single treatment, is more snappy than affecting, its phrases set off by repeated triplet patterns of scatting.  One of the most interesting specimens is the practically rhythmless suspension of “Hopedrunk Everasking,” all slippery harmonies, shifting key signatures, and the choral effects of Harle and Polachek multitracking her voice at what serves as a bridge.  An idyll, with hints of loucheness around the edges, it is the very distillation of longing.  “Blood and Butter” manages a synthesis of electropop and elements of traditional Celtic music, even sneaking in a bit of bagpipery from Brighde Chaimbul, evoking the Beatles’ use of the clavioline on “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” (1967).  With its “Whiter Shade of Pale” (also 1967)–style organ arrangement, the ballad “Butterfly Net” smolders at first and then truly ignites, displaying the most heart-on-sleeve singing on the record.  Although the finale, “Billions,” comes a close second, steamy and yearning even as it moves like a processional, ending with a lovely choral arrangement of the repeated line “I never felt so close to you,” as performed by students of London’s Trinity School, the Trinity Choir (who also appear on “Butterfly Net”).  An album that grows into its own power, as this one does, signals an artist on the verge of breaking through—at least, that is what Sony Records is hoping.  There is a deluxe edition of the record, issued on Valentine’s Day, that is nearly double the length, with seven new tracks and an alternate take on “Butterfly Net” featuring Weyes Blood (Natalie Laura Mering), but I have not heard it.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Billions”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zEQJrggKgk
 

DANIEL ROSSEN, You Belong There (Warp Records)—This entry is actually here by mistake since it is a 2022 release, which I did not notice until too late, but what the heck.  Is Daniel Rossen the Franz Schubert of his day?  Well, let us not overstate the case, but You Belong There, his solo debut, is certainly an intriguing collection of art songs in a popular music vein, florid, unruly and unpredictable, full of Spanish-style acoustic guitar accompaniment.  Those familiar with Grizzly Bear (currently on indefinite hiatus; see the 2012 and 2017 music surveys) will readily recognize Rossen’s voice and stylistic flourishes; he also is one-half of Department of Eagles.  Rossen’s voice is not particularly full bodied, but like Paul Banks’s (of Interpol), it is wiry with inherent tension.  In addition to guitar, Rossen plays a range of instruments (piano, synths, cello and bass violin, woodwinds) and is accompanied throughout on percussion by his Grizzly Bear mate Christopher Bear, as well as several other musicians on select tracks.  As restive and unruly as many of these tunes are, they are also, like the British band Gomez, genteel to a fault.  As with Grizzly Bear’s records, these songs are complicated, harmonically daring and slippery, and demand repeated listening to assimilate.  They do not always hold together well, coming across as fragmentary passages stitched together or rambling in the longer compositions, notably “Unpeopled Space” and “I’ll Wait for Your Visit.”  The most successful are those that are self-contained, in particular “Keeper and Kin” and “The Last One,” toward the end of the playlist.  The melodic kernel at the heart of “Keeper and Kin” never really changes; the strength is in the arrangements:  the ominous bass tones from piano and strings, the rumbling and spasmodic drum attacks, the 10cc “I’m Not in Love” (1975) echoey vocal sustain all heighten the sense of Goth drama without flagging over the course of six minutes.  “The Last One” is the most conventional song on the disc yet also the most effective:  its descending vocal and string fades and bittersweet, taut harmonics have a wrenching pull on the listener.  The opener, “It’s a Passage,” has the thorny complexity of mid-career Grizzly Bear, with a strikingly illuminating chiaroscuro melodic line at its center.  “Shadow in the Frame” features a simple sung tune embroidered by acoustic guitar (in the YouTube version below, that is all there is) but wanders quite some distance from that base in the more overwrought passages with synths and cymbal-and-snare-heavy percussion.  “Tangle” begins true to its title with frenetic keyboard runs and simmering and boiling percussion and then becomes deflatingly becalmed in its second half, with off-color tonal shifts and a clomping rhythm.  “Celia” is a weird little piece:  static, stentorian, its dusky bucolic/Western imagery (the album was recorded in Santa Fe) and braying tones seemingly at odds with the imagery in the midst of the verse of the titular child being put to sleep following story time.  Oddly, the short title track is the quietest, despite rolling percussion attacks, and most inert of any on the album.  Disjointed as some of the songwriting may be, and scattered with wacky turn-on-a-dime phrasing and instrumental choices, You Belong There is freshly innovative and sophisticated music and is a must-have for anyone who was attuned to Grizzly Bear’s eccentric vibe.    A-

Sample song  “Shadow in the Frame”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9SSeZNXnTU
 

SIGUR RÓS, Átta (Von Dur/BMG Rights Management)—Though Ágætis byrjun (1999) probably garnered the most critical acclaim, for my taste, Sigur Rós reached a creative crest much later, in the early 2010s, with the albums Valtari (see the 2012 music survey) and Kveikur (see the 2013 music survey).  There then followed a ten-year hiatus, during which two band members, Kjartan Sveinsson (keyboards) and Orri Páll Dýrason (drums), departed.  The Icelandic band toured and worked on various soundtracks and other projects in the interim.  Then Sveinsson, the only member with formal musical training, rejoined in time for the production of Átta (Eight, meaning the band’s eighth studio release).  The results underwhelm.  A lot of effort went into making this record, including string arrangements for the London Chamber Orchestra by its conductor, Robert Ames, along with María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir and the band itself, and brass on “Klettur” (Cliff) and “8” from the horn ensemble Brassgat í bala (The Horny Brass-dards).  Yet it is easily the dullest and most static Sigur Rós record in quite a long time, which is not to say that it is bad.  It still bears the hallmarks of the band’s three-decade-long career:  magisterial melodies, sumptuous orchestrations, snail-like pacing, and Jónsi’s (Jón Þór Birgisson) elfin vocals.  But themes are struck up and given little exposition or development, in the main.  Chord progressions sometimes carry over from one song into the next:  “Gloð” (Ember) into “Blóðberg” (Creeping Thyme); “Gold” into “Ylur” (Warmth); “Fall” into “8.”  Several compositions feature a needlessly long tail, in which the music fades out only to return pianissimo, without adding anything novel; there is also lots of space around the tracks in the production.  The band aimed for a sound that, in the absence of Orri Páll Dýrason, who was facing a sexual assault allegation, minimized percussion.  But there is little of the complexity, the sense of moment, the gradually unfolding drama, tension, and sudden revelation of spectacular sonic vistas heard with the band’s albums of yore.  The shining exception is “Klettur,” which not coincidentally has some prominent percussion.  This song actually progresses from the keening introduction into a broad, sweeping chorus, sweet but with notes of underlying discord.  When the verse returns, the lamentation is magnified through added volume and instrumentation.  To a certain degree, the serene and honeyed “Gold” also feels like a true song rather than a vignette or soundtrack incidental music.  Perhaps you are hearing in your mind in the simple chord sequence the Mamas and the Papas’ “Monday, Monday” (1966), or Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” (1989), or even Radiohead’s “Black Star” (1995).  (Or maybe it is just me.)  “Andrá” is a particularly pretty tune that, like most on the disc, cries out for further evolution.  Jónsi told Evan Minsker of Pitchfork that the band wanted the music on Átta “to be really sparse, floaty and beautiful,” but sometimes you buy a loaf of bread and get it home to discover there is more air than substance inside.    B+

Sample song  “Klettur”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1aD81YtYN4
 

WATER FROM YOUR EYES, Everyone’s Crushed (Matador Records)—This duo of Rachel Brown (vocals, lyrics) and Nate Amos (all instruments, except on tour) cites Ween and the late Scott Walker (Noel Scott Engel) as influences.  Because Ween is all over the place stylistically and I am less familiar with Walker’s oeuvre, what came to mind was a couple of English acts, Micachu and the Shapes (now known as Good Sad Happy Bad; see the 2009 and 2012 music surveys) and Dry Cleaning (see the 2021 and 2022 music surveys).  Not nearly as witty lyrically as Dry Cleaning, still, Water from Your Eyes leans heavily on the spoken word to compensate for Brown’s vocal shortcomings.  The noisier tracks recall the experimentalism of Micachu, none more so than “True Life,” with its clangorous descending fifths on guitar, but without the vacuum cleaners or other special effects Mica Levi loved to indulge in.  Eventually, its bloodless verse is subsumed by a roiling, undulating tsunami of bass sound.  Like another eclectically arty band of a previous generation, the Fiery Furnaces, the male/female duo (former romantic partners, whereas Fiery Furnaces are a brother-sister act) hail from the Chicagoland region but are Brooklyn based.  Most of the music is fairly minimalist, art punk or dance punk of a sort, and because Amos has a good ear and compositional talent, it generally works on its own terms.  The prototype is the closer, “Buy My Product,” with its zippy bass line, pealing guitar wails, and antiseptic recitation of the lyrics’ pitch to the listener, a spiel for which even its author has little to no faith.  In an odd way, it bears a faint echo down through the years of the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” (1978).  The longer and slower songs are more daring but also expose Brown’s frailties when she genuinely tries to sing a full musical line.  “Open” relies on feedback and reverb, with a sludgy undercurrent of synthesizer (in truth, it would have been difficult for even a talented singer to bring off its sallow vocal), whereas “Remember Not My Name,” while suffused with its own reverb and distortion, is more akin to one of the dreamier flights of fancy from Cibo Matto’s Viva! La Woman (1996) except less tuneful, as the song steers itself into a cul-de-sac.  The longest offering on the disc—at almost six minutes, nearly one-fifth of the album—“14” also has the sparsest lyrics, counting out the quasi-instrumental opening track, “Structure.”  All sustained tones and repetitive verses, it is the most tedious of the songs on display, a tone poem that never progresses.  While “Structure” is ear catching in and of itself, combining electric string tremolos with chamber pop choral hummed tones, a single vocal line, and a klaxon synth overtone, “Barley” is the real scene setter.  It churns through its single repeating keyboard flutter, piling on robotic chanting, otherwordly synth arpeggiations, groovy guitar embellishment, and kick-ass percussion.  “Out There” is more spacy but thoroughly enchanting, featuring a crunchy bass line, a steel-pan-like flourish, and a sung melody that begins in minor mode but shifts to major to end the phrase, culminating in a caterwauling guitar chorus.  The title track is a demented Zen koan of sorts, in the spirit of Was (Not Was)’s “Man vs. the Empire Brain Building” (1983), chopping and rearranging its sole lyric till it is drained of any real meaning, set, like its Was (Not Was) predecessor, to a simple bouncy rhythm, shifting weight from one foot to the other, with raucous guitar and sax outbursts for seasoning.  Everyone’s Crushed may seem slight in some respects, but Amos’s instrumental and songwriting skills pull off a small coup de foudre.  The label thought highly enough of the record to put out a remix later in the year featuring other artists’ reimagining of the songs called Crushed by Everyone.    A-

Sample song  “Barley”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tdPKlYTWn4
 

WEVAL, Remember (Technicolour Records/Ninja Tune)—After expectations were raised by the splendors of The Weight, Weval’s previous album (see the 2019 music survey), Remember registers as a mild comedown. More  upbeat generally and danceable than its predecessor, its songs are less distinctive.  One still hears the imprint of house music, Harm Coolen’s specialty, and trip-hop, near and dear to the heart of Merijn Scholte Albers, as well as dubstep beats and influences, such as vocal distortion.  But other than “cool grooves,” it is hard to say much about many of the tracks.  The album culminates with “Changed for the Better,” which calls on the resources of frequent collaborator Koen-Willem Toering for vocals and “chorus” (some voicings bent upward from tenor into the alto range).  The mood is both tense and relaxed, like a comfortable crouch, with the primary theme dusky and unsettling yet also undergoing subtle key shifts that color the outlook.  The song’s middle section reduces the instrumentation to the synth programming that accompanies the theme.  The two songs that welcome in fellow Dutch singer/songwriter Eefje de Visser, “Never Stay for Love” and “Is That How You Feel It,” also demonstrate their mettle.  “Never Stay for Love” showcases de Visser’s silken voice in an orchestrated setting that also privileges crepuscular bass tones and slinky, R&B-influenced rhythms.  Comparably, “Is That How You Feel It,” with its slack tempo and obsidian-toned orchestration, is cousin to some of Blood Orange’s (Dev Hynes) more tenebrous tracks.  Clomping rhythms make “Everything Went Well” more memorable than its title (other titles are about as anonymous), but there are also the suave, airy, Steve Miller Band–ish vocals, sometimes seeming as if projected from a great remove.  In contrast, “Don’t Lose Time” is basically the sum of its sharply syncopated rhythmic patterns, until the song hits a major break toward the close, squelching into a frothy mini-fantasia à la Pond or Tame Impala.  “I Saw You” is the most dubstep-py and cyberpunk in attitude; nice beats but limited in range.  For “Day after Day,” plinking keyboards descend from clarity at the outset into muddiness amid a glowering funk of grotty bass and percussion, concluding in a puddle of pitch distortion.  The title track and “Forever,” bookmarks to the tracklist, are perhaps deliberately similar in design and feel, the former sunnier in tone, and about equally jejune.  Because lyrics are all but indecipherable, any larger meaning the duo wants to draw about the passage of time and illusions of memory goes for naught.  Coolen and Albers pull off some moments in which the atmospherics are intoxicating on Remember, but the palette was livelier and more varied in their previous efforts, and it just feels as if the new one has been polished to a fault.    B+

Sample song  “Don’t Lose Time”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgTCvqE3xyA
 

WITCH (We Intend to Cause Havoc), Zango (Desert Daze Sound/Partisan Records)—Prior to this album’s promotion, I was not even aware of a category known as Zamrock.  It had its heyday in rapidly urbanizing mining districts of northern Zambia in the 1970s, as President Kenneth Kaunda’s mid-sixties decree that 95 percent of music played on radio stations had to be Zambian in origin sparked a fusion of indigenous styles and the British and American rock and funk that was otherwise saturating the airwaves.  The music then went into eclipse in the mid-1980s, felled by the twin plagues of HIV and the severe recession caused by the collapse of world copper prices.  Witch put forth what turned out to be its swansong in 1984, Kuomboka.  Lead singer Emanuel “Jagari” Chanda left the group by the end of the 1970s, frustrated by the narrowing space for free expression under the increasingly authoritarian Kaunda, and by 2001, all of the original bandmembers except for Chanda had died of AIDS.  A revival of interest in the genre led Witch to re-form, with Jagari again at the forefront, about a decade ago.  Now sporting a lineup that includes Patrick Mwondela, a Witch alum from the years immediately following Chanda’s departure, on keyboards and synthesizers plus a coterie of German, Swiss, and Dutch guitarists and the Amsterdam-based drummer Nico (or Nic) Mauskovic, the reconstituted band has issued its first new studio album in nearly forty years, recording it at the revived DB Studios in Lusaka, which had produced the first Witch disc back in 1973 but had shut down by the late nineties.  Jagari’s vocal prowess, never all that impressive to begin with, has declined now that he is a wizened 71 years old.  In certain spots he sounds somewhat like David Byrne, which is not entirely a bad thing, though Byrne’s voice has more character than quality.  Much of the record has the pleasant, lilting quality characteristic of melodies from all over the continent, something that was readily transmuted into calypso in the Caribbean.  And since rock rhythms are African in origin in any case, no special accommodation was needed.  The instruments used are those of a typical rock outfit, with the exception of a few percussion add-ons (shaker and “skin drum”).  While the effort to revive Zamrock is a worthy one, I find Zango’s (the album title perhaps comes from the Hausa word for “camping spot” or “resting place” in transit, though this is a West African, not a southern African, tongue) lack of oomph dismaying.  Too often it gutters when I expected it to coruscate.  To take an example, the title “Streets of Lusaka” promises something lively and bustling, yet Jagari’s song just bops along mildly, never varying from its dully amiable melodic core.  “Avalanche of Love,” which features the Melbourne-based Zambian female rapper Sampa the Great (Sampa Tembo) trading off vocals with Jagari, is more fiery, with plenty of rhythmic snap and variation, including a breathy slow snippet with wah-wah pulsing, but again barely a sliver of a tune to carry it.  The introductory song, “By the Time You Realize,” clomps along, with echoes of buzzy psychedelia, in spite of some guitar funk embellishment; here, Jagari’s vocal delivery is in full Byrne querying mode (you could almost hear “This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful wife!” behind it).  One of the few songs that has a true chorus, one almost wishes it did not; it is raucous and bleating.  More psychedelia attends to “Stop the Rot,” but the guitar attack toward the end is the only vigor on display.  Jagari’s singing is particularly tremulous in “These Eyes of Mine,” but the mellow guitar and keyboard accompaniment is sunny and warm enough to redeem, at least partly, a feeble chorus.  “Message from W.I.T.C.H.” at the end of the tracklist is not much of a composition—a shivery guitar riff and percussion, above which Jagari pours forth bromides about how love overcomes all biases; notwithstanding the minimal instrumentation, this is the most Antibalas-like “song” on the record.  “Nshingile” features another old-timer, Keith Kabwe of Amanaz, as the singer and co-composer.  Amanaz only produced one record, in 1975, but it was considered seminal for the Zamrock movement; “Nshingile” is more agile and fleet, however, than anything on that laid-back, psychedelia-drenched recording from nearly fifty years ago.  The two songs featuring the Zambian solo guitarist/singer Theresa N’Gambi (or Ng’ambi) as well as Hannah Tembo, for whom no other information is available (she could be a relative of Sampa, but I suspect that Tembo is a fairly common surname), “Unimvwesha Shuga” and “Malango,” are, despite relaxed tempos, spirited and laced with funk.  “Unimvwesha Shuga” closes with some over-the-top screeches.  “Malango” swivels through undulating syncopations and has a couple of passages in which sixteenth-note figurations ratchet up the rhythmic intensity.  The one song that really burns from start to finish is “Waile,” with Jagari again unintentionally calling forth the former Talking Heads bandleader, backed up (as on several other songs) by N’Gambi and Hannah Tembo.  I wish that more of the album could have been as dynamic and grooving—even the slow bridge section of “Waile” crackles and wails—but it was not meant to be.    B+/B

Sample song  “Waile”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HCNRBnI4PA

 

MISCELLANEOUS (GENRE-FLUID)

POLYRHYTHMICS, Filter System (Polyrhythmics/self-released)—A number of streams come together in the music of this Seattle-based instrumental septet:  funk, “progressive jazz,” Afrobeat, psychedelic rock.  Its music is similar to that of Staten Island’s Budos Band (see the 2007 and 2010 music surveys), which has been around just a few years longer than the thirteen years Polyrhythmics has been in existence.  Both bands have put out six studio albums.  Budos, recording on the Daptone label, probably leans more heavily on Afrobeat and foregrounds the horn section to a greater degree.  Filter System, a title chosen to reflect the band’s democratic songwriting process, is not boundary pushing but is skillful in its conception and execution.  The title track opens the set with a sly funk groove that becomes a casual conversation between muted trumpet (Scott Morning) and guitar (Ben Bloom).  Two-thirds of the way through, the rhythm changes up to something more Caribbean while keeping the same shadowy tone, with horns and flutter-tongued flute (to produce a grainy sound) from Art Brown.  “Filter System” is briefly reprised halfway through the track list, heavier on the percussion and electronic effects and minus the brass players.  “Clydesdale” is funkier still, a back-and-forth between Jason Gray’s bass maintaining the rhythm and Budos-like horn attacks, with dynamics that periodically crescendo for emphasis.  Eventually, Brown’s saxophone enters the dialogue in place of the brass and performs an easygoing improvisation that becomes more strained and insistent at the close.  “Shaft” (1971)–style wah-wah guitar and undulating rhythms undergird the lively horn melody that carries “Roller” to a rocking conclusion.  Following a quasi-Ethio-jazz beginning, “Fly Trap” brings back da funk via Afrobeat horns, heard through a scrim of electronic echo chamber ambience.  “Garden Gnomes” deploys a Middle Eastern–style theme on guitar amid spacy keyboards and jittery horn charts; like “Filter System,” this composition undergoes a radical rhythmic shift partway through, switching to a clomping beat led by bells.  The record sags a bit in its midsection:  “March of Darkness,” “Wet Leather,” and “Twice Baked” assume the fuzzy contours of smooth jazz.  “Wet Leather,” after a promising reggae-inflected start, settles into a suave trumpet solo, like something Herb Alpert might have coasted on in his post–Tijuana Brass days, while “March of Darkness” features a tamed exchange between the Hammond organ of Nathan Spicer and Elijah Clark’s trombone foray.  At the end of the album, “Funky Miracle” promises far more than it limply delivers, moodily subdued but hardly a miracle and played fairly straightforward in defiance of its title, with a docile sax solo.  The soft underbelly aside, however, Filter System contains enough strong entries to sate any lounge lizard.    A-

Sample song  “Clydesdale” (no video available):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBopbc128O0

 

 

CLASSICAL

As is customary, I will not attempt to grade or critique the one classical album I included in the survey, merely provide a description.

MISSY MAZZOLI, Dark with Excessive Bright (Peter Herresthal, violin; Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan; Arctic Philharmonic, conducted by Tim Weiss) (Bis Records)—Having trained with Meredith Monk, John Harbison, David Lang, and others, Missy Mazzoli can be considered one of the foremost American composers of her generation (born in 1980).  Her work has appeared once before in this survey (2010), with her ensemble Victoire for its debut record, Cathedral City.  The new disc gathers several of her orchestral works with a short piece for solo violin and tape.  Dark with Excessive Bright takes its name from a verse out of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  The volume is bookended by two settings of the concerto that lent its title to the CD, one that began life with a double bass as the solo artist in 2018 as commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.  Peter Herresthal, the Norwegian violinist featured on this disc, then asked her to reconceive it for solo violin, with its drastically different range.  The initial setting is the more conventional one, for soloist and orchestra (here, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra).  Portions of it are quite lyrical, and one interval in the soloist’s part made me think of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending (1914), although other passages are scored for near the top end of the instrument’s range, which brought to mind Pablo de Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy of 1881.  There are swooping orchestral glissandos aplenty, but the soloist more than carries his share of the load; over the span of fourteen minutes, there are no extended ensemble sections in the score.  The latter setting is for violinist and string quintet, with members of the Norwegian Arctic Philharmonic, based in Tromsø and Bodø, and is naturally more stripped down.  The two-movement Orpheus Undone (2021) for orchestra begins with a woodblock mimicking a ticking clock and moves quickly to staccato tutti attacks reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913).  The composition remains unsettling throughout, with more wrenchingly note-bending lines, churns, thunderclaps, and sustained moments of vibrato-laden tension, and the woodblock returning periodically, closing out the first movement.  Of the shorter pieces on the album, the Vespers for Violin (2014) is, like the titular concerto, a reworking of an earlier piece, Vespers for a New Dark Age, from the same year.  Herresthal’s agitated solo part is amplified so as not to be overwhelmed by the electronic soundtrack, which consists of ethereal long tones and choral passages from the original, manipulated through distortion.  The Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) (2013) for orchestra itself has diving glissandos and other tempestuous outbursts disturbing an atmosphere of serenity; it does seem to become more icy and remote as it proceeds, like a trip through the outermost of Gustav Holst’s Planets (1917).  These Worlds in Us (2006), also for orchestra, is dedicated to Mazzoli’s father, a Vietnam veteran, and its gripping passages of quietude aim, in the composer’s own liner notes, to demonstrate that pain and bliss can be expressed in the same phrase.