Things continued to get worse for the recording
industry. A sign of the times was that Virgin Megastores announced shortly after the new year that it was closing its Times Square flagship outlet and then pulling out of all its
U.S. locations. With Virgin gone, the situation in
New York reverted to what it had been prior to the advent of the mega-chains, HMV, Tower Records, and Virgin: the biggest and best record store in the city is once again J&R Music World on Park Row. A good distance behind J&R in second place is Barnes & Noble, which is strong in classical but weak on popular music, followed by Borders and (yes, I am afraid to say) Best Buy. There are still a fair number of specialty stores scattered around the city, but they are small. Yes, you can get pretty much anything online, but that presumes that you know what you are looking for—a real record store allows for serendipitous exposure.
Music services like Pandora now try to introduce the listener to new music by making predictions based on expressed tastes, but they are necessarily limited. My experience with a former coworker using the service is that everything comes out sounding like Modest Mouse; maybe that was just him and his predilections. And I lost respect for the founder of Pandora, Tim Westergren, when, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, he defended the band Journey and attacked “hipsters” for disparaging everything that is commercially successful. “Hipsters” do not dismiss artists on the basis of broad popularity; they pan music that is awful. Like Journey!
For the second year running, I will list my top ten pop/rock records (original releases only) here in order of preference. For 2009, I thought about eliminating the Latin and “world” (miscellaneous) categories and grouping under the rubric of pop anything not jazz or classical. In the end, I decided that there is still some usefulness in maintaining separate classifications, though I moved much of the Latin material (and one African record) that had aspirations toward mainstream pop into the primary section, making these CDs eligible for Album of the Year.
The year in music was not an outstanding one, but neither was it the weakest I have witnessed this decade. Some interesting pairings can be made from the records in the survey, starting with the euphonious coincidence that albums titled Ay Ay Ay and Hu Hu Hu both made the top ten list. The survey contains two records from Philadelphia bands (Espers and A Sunny Day in Glasgow) and two from six-foot-tall female singers from the United Kingdom, one backed by a band (Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine) and the other not (Imogen Heap). There were two epic-scale productions (Oneida’s triple-disc Rated O and the Decemberists’ rock-operatic The Hazards of Love). Also, two bands with Japanese names (Asobi Seksu and Nisennenmondai), two albums with national capitals (from opposite ends of Eurasia) in their titles (Goodnight Oslo and Destination Tokyo), two from electronica-geek specialists (Étienne Jaumet and Thomas Watkiss), and one CD from a wan Air imitator (Au Revoir Simone) to pair with the real thing (Air’s not very good Love 2). Several worthwhile acts narrowly missed the top ten list, notably Regina Spektor’s Far, Espers’s III, and Nisennenmondai’s Destination Tokyo. At the other end of the scale, particularly disappointing were Forro in the Dark’s Light a Candle, Asobi Seksu’s Citrus, Passion Pit’s Manners, and Peter Bjorn and John’s Living Thing. In the realm of retrospectives, the compilation of the music of Ethiopia’s Mulatu Astatke, New York-Addis-London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975, will be a revelation to those (myself included) who had never been exposed to his work, and the special expanded edition of Radiohead’s OK Computer with alternate takes and bonus tracks is well worth a hearing. In jazz, new recordings by the Steve Lehman Octet, the Vijay Iyer Trio, and Medeski Martin & Wood stood out. The year in classical music saw noteworthy releases from the collective Alarm Will Sound and from Chen Yi, as well as a reconstruction of the Ninth Symphony of the late Alfred Schnittke by Alexander Raskatov.
Album of the Year honors go to Animal Collective for Merriweather Post Pavilion. Over the course of the decade, this band has been growing in confidence while avoiding the pitfalls of hubris and pretension. It has also managed to stay out of a creative rut, even as it continues to make music the same way it has all along—childlike, volatile, hard to pin down, yet streaked with brilliance. The list of the top ten follows:
1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Broadcast and the Focus Group – Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age
3. Zero 7 – Yeah Ghost
4. Black Moth Super Rainbow – Eating Us
5. Flight of the Conchords – I Told You I Was Freaky
6. The Fiery Furnaces – I’m Going Away
7. Matías Aguayo – Ay Ay Ay
8. Metric – Fantasies
9. Natalia Lafourcade – Hu Hu Hu
10. Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 – Goodnight Oslo
Although I call this the “once-a-year blog,” I will return shortly with my list of the top 100 for the decade.
Notes from live performances this past year: I skipped the Coney Island Siren Festival once again—maybe I am getting too old to stand around or sit on concrete in a broiling July sun for hours, but for a compelling enough lineup of acts, I probably would. David Byrne played to a sold-out, overcapacity crowd at Celebrate Brooklyn! in midsummer. Melissa and I were there, among the huge overflow crowd extending well beyond the seating and fenced-off area, unable to see the performance except on video monitors, but he gave the audience all it could ask for. Rhys Chatham pulled off his minimalist/maximalist concert for 200 guitars in
Lincoln Center’s
Damrosch Park in August, but we did not linger for much of it. We squeezed into a few square feet of boardwalk at South Street Seaport one summer Saturday evening for a show by Black Moth Super Rainbow (see below), memorable as much for the lead singer's gorilla suit and mask like something out of Russian folk tales of Koshchei the Deathless (and his practice of throwing snacks to the audience) as for the music. Indoors, we saw Juana Molina (see the 2008 music survey) cast her one-woman incantatory spells at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, preceded by Lia Ices. At the Highline Ballroom in mid-spring, we were treated to a stirring concert by Andrea Echeverri (see picture at left) and Aterciopelados. In April, I got to sit in the orchestra seats (ground level) at Carnegie Hall for the first time, watching the bass René Pape in concert. And, although this is not strictly musical yet somewhat operatic, in
Barcelona in May, we saw the young chef of a restaurant in a happening neighborhood spend a considerable portion of our mealtime berating the older woman working the front of the room with florid gestures. Quite possibly, she was his mother.
Passings: Aside from Michael Jackson, the music world lost soprano Hildegard Behrens, composer Leon Kirchner (see the 2008 music survey), composer Maurice Jarre, and pianist/conductor/composer Lukas Foss from the classical/opera sphere; pops conductor Erich Kunzel; Canadian Brass trumpeter Fred Mills; master guitarist and guitar maker Les Paul; jazz singer Blossom Dearie, jazz drummer Louie Bellson and percussionist/bandleaders Joe Cuba and Manny Oquendo; legendary Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa; legendary American singer Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary; Indian
sarod player Ali Akbar Khan; blues singer Koko Taylor; New Orleans singer/guitarist Snooks Eaglin; singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt; Estelle Bennett of the Ronetttes; keyboardist Billy Powell from Lynyrd Skynyrd;.Buffalo Springfield drummer Dewey Martin; guitarist James Gurley of Big Brother and the Holding Company; guitarist Rowland S. Howard of The Birthday Party; bass player Kelly Groucutt of the Electric Light Orchestra; guitarist Randall Bewley of Pylon (see the 2007 music survey); NRBQ guitarist Steve Ferguson; soul singer Randy Cain of the Delfonics; Dan Seals (one-half of England Dan and John Ford Coley); onetime Wilco member Jay Bennett; lead singer/songwriter Eric Woolfson of the Alan Parsons Project; and “turntablist” DJ AM, among others.
Yet again, circumstances and my own fastidious obsessiveness did not permit me to finish the survey until long after everyone else had done their 2009 year-end reviews. For those (few) of you who were actually waiting for this to be published, I offer my customary apology for the delay. I could point to any number of complicating events, from family matters to a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Virgin Islands. But the truth is, it takes a long time to review 66 albums (a new personal record) and to do it thoroughly, and I would not have it any other way.
As usual, I would like to thank Steve Holtje for sharing advice and musical opinions over the course of the year, as well as the helpful staff at
Sound Fix Records in
Williamsburg,
Brooklyn. Thanks to my brother, Douglas, for technical assistance. Thanks also to Melissa for her encouragement, patience, and understanding. This year, I dedicate the survey to my father, who died following a long illness on April 22, 2010, as I was just finishing the last of the reviews. He never much cared for the rock/popular music of the younger generation, but he loved Gilbert and Sullivan and classic musicals.
ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR:
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, Merriweather Post Pavilion—Animal
Collective’s eighth full-length recording, named for a Frank Gehry-designed amphitheater in
Columbia, Maryland, where the band members watched live performances as boys, came out at the beginning of the year, to mostly rapturous critical reviews.
Indeed, it may be the group’s best effort yet, though its previous release,
Strawberry Jam (see the music survey for 2007), provides strong competition. It is exciting when a band that has already issued a string of interesting records still appears to be on the upward arc of its creative power. Along with
Arcade Fire, Animal
Collective has been one of the most inventive rock bands of the decade. The major distinction between
Merriweather Post Pavilion and previous albums is the departure, said to be temporary, of guitarist Deakin, a.k.a. Josh Dibb. As a result, the disc de-emphasizes guitar (though several band members are multi-instrumentalists) in favor of electric keyboards and a heavy stress on electronic sampling. In truth, given the kaleidoscopic scattergram of Animal Collective’s heavily processed, psychedelic sound, the absence of strings does not make that much difference. The music is still simultaneously elementary—full of wide-eyed wonder—and sophisticated: simple melodies, twisted, bent out of shape, transmogrified, together with off-kilter lyrics. The reverb accompanying the voice of Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) has drawn comparisons to Brian Wilson, but those go only so far: Animal Collective is not remotely close to surf music. The subdued introduction of the opener, “In the Flowers,” with its bubbliness, ringing tones, and shimmering textures, erupts into calculated pandemonium (this spasmodic tendency is typical of the group’s work) and just as quickly subsides. The next song, “My Girls,” is filtered through a steady downpour of high-pitched keyboard triplets, with the initial exposition of the melody taking place in rhythmic suspension, before the percussion kicks in as the theme recapitulates. A mildly startling yowl punctuates the song’s chorus. (“I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things/ Like social status/ I just want four walls and adobe slats/For my girls. [OOOOW!]”) As with prior Animal Collective albums, the CD does not offer lyrics,which is a shame because, although the words are easier to pick out than on earlier releases, they can still get lost in the whirlwind of sound. Even the song titles are printed in a font that is nearly impossible to read, at least for the nearsighted. And credits—forget about them! Or buy the LP version. “Lion in a Coma,” the one number co-written with an outsider, the South African Lathozi Mpahleni Manquin Madosini, features a digeridoo-like drone. The song with the most Beach Boys-esque harmony is “Bluish.” But throughout, there is a premium on a tunefulness the listener can readily latch onto, even though such pearls are embedded in a wildly swirly mother-of-pearl sonic superstructure. The signature piece on
Merriweather Post Pavilion is the closer, “Brother Sport.” Initially almost tediously repetitious in its drilling of a succession of motifs into the listener’s head, about halfway through, it seizes on a magnificently lovely hook (foreshadowed in an earlier theme), something one could imagine being sung as a round like “Frère Jacques,” and milks it for all it is worth, which is plenty; it is likely to stay planted in your mind all day long.
A
And the rest . . .
MATÍAS AGUAYO, Ay Ay Ay—Formerly one-half of the electronica/D.J. duo Closer Musik in Europe, Matías Aguayo is doing his own thing now, with one foot in Europe and the other in
South America. He is characterized at times as the male counterpart to Juana Molina (see the 2008 music survey)—though such comparisons naturally only go so far—because both are from the Southern Cone, have a connection to
Argentina (Aguayo, a native of Santiago de Chile who grew up in
Cologne, currently bases himself in Buenos Aires), and make all-enveloping, atmospheric electronic music that embraces repetition and eschews formal structure. Aguayo’s music is less high concept; he seems more interested in getting a good groove going. He is responsible for all the songwriting here and, with the exception of a co-production arrangement on the title track, the production as well. The songs all have a core rhythmic pattern, which might be provided by drum and bass or by his version of the human beatbox, yet, using these patterns as a foundation on which to riff freely, he manages to change things up enough to keep the listener engaged—the two selections that suffer from too much sameness are the title track and the final one, “Juanita,” which is not coincidentally the longest. Though the music has no true verse, chorus, or bridge, there is a songlike quality to Aguayo’s brand of electronica, which is a big part of the appeal. The breeziest track is “Rollerskate,” the closest thing to a hit on the album. “Rollerskate” consists almost entirely of Aguayo’s voice, in various incarnations: as beatbox, as a repeating monotone rhythmic phrase sounding like a muted trumpet, as the bass harmony, and of course singing the breathy tenor melody, whose words
never get beyond “rough roller rollerskate skate roller.” Not exactly deep—Aguayo has said he was just “thinking of a girl on rollerskates”—but certainly enjoyable and even catchy. “Menta Latte” (Mint Latte), the opening track, has a similarly fizzy quality, notwithstanding the swoony vocals, the descending-minor-scale bass ostinato, and all the buzzing going on in the background. Lyrics are sometimes in English, some Spanish, others hard to make out at all. In a Carharrt interview, Aguayo was asked how much of
Africa is in his music. The answer seems to be, quite a lot, not just in the vaguely
African-sounding title “Koro Koro” but in the vocals of “Ritmo Juárez” (Juárez Rhythm), which immediately precedes it. The falsetto harmonies on “Ritmo Juárez” actually put me in mind of
New York’s TV on the Radio (see the 2008 music survey). Other songs, such as “Ritmo Tres,” “Ay Shit – The Master,” and “Me Vuelvo Loca” (I Go Crazy), come more directly out of the house music and club beats that nurtured Aguayo as part of Closer Musik. The rhythmic pattern that overstays its welcome in “Juanita” is created by what sounds like woodwinds and a melodica, eventually leavened with accordion and some eerily high-pitched vocalizing.
A/A-
AIR, Love 2—This may be Air’s most insubstantial record to date, and, given the French duo’s track record, that is quite a statement. The lyrics are utterly vapid (they are still better than those of some groups in this survey that are sincerely aiming higher), but that has always been the case. The music may be viewed by some as insipid or banal, little different from such new age darlings as Yanni or Enya. (I can envision a sexually ambiguous, Greco-Celtic act called Enyanni someday.) But Air is in fact different: listen to the instrumental track “Eat My Beat” for proof. The band is not afraid to rock the house in ways that your average
Windham Hill devotee might find jarring. OK, so “Eat My Beat” has an obvious-sounding chord progression, but what Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin do to manipulate that sequence and nestle it within an array of electronic
textures is fascinating and convincing. Dunckel started out as a mathematician, and Godin as an architect, but they know how to package a catchy hook. Having reached a sort of moderate artistic peak (like summiting
Florida’s
high point, Britton Hill) with
Moon Safari (1998) and
Talkie Walkie (2004), the Versailles-based pair may noodle on endlessly to no great effect, but one can still admire their handiwork in the same way one appreciates a skilled pastry chef’s meringues. Even so, much of
Love 2 tests my patience. The opener, “Do the Joy,” deftly marries a grungy bass guitar figuration to a woozy synthesizer theme and limpid piano accompaniment. The song’s message makes a feint toward concern for climate change and species extinction before dissolving into fizzy bromides. The following song, “Love,” has only one word (guess which?) and is so formulaic it could have been written by a computer. “So Light Is Her Footfall” has a suave melody over lounge-y percussion, notably what sounds like a woodpecker at work, bringing to mind the casual electronica of Supreme Beings of Leisure. “Be a Bee” (again, really
moronic lyrics) buzzes around as the synthesizers and guitar chase each other through descending patterns that sound borrowed from something Henry Mancini might have composed for a 1960s television series, over rapid-fire percussion. “Tropical Disease,” the longest piece on the record, sandwiches two slow sections with a sultry saxophone and guitar reverb (and mercifully few words) around a swifter-moving core of emptily pretty pianism, upwelling synths, and the piping of an artificially generated recorder. “Missing the Light of the Day” and “African Velvet” content themselves with introducing ear-caressing themes rather than developing them into sturdier and more rewarding material. The album reaches a nadir with “Sing Sang Sung”; although there are a number of throwaway compositions, this one takes the prize for combining an infantile melody with a saccharine lyric. I would like some more complex sugars in my next meringue.
B/B-
ASOBI SEKSU, Hush—The follow-up to
Citrus (2006) is decidedly the slighter of the two records. On
Citrus, the two-person group—Yuki Chikudate on vocals and synthesizers; James Hanna on guitars, backing vocals, and synths; plus a lot of programmed percussion—rode the wave of the
shoegaze revival to heights of cotton candy ecstasy, memorably ending one song on a blaring ten-minute-long chord. It is hard to tell what Chikudate and Hanna were aiming for on the new CD, besides fulfilling a contractual obligation to
Polyvinyl Records. The same fundamentals are present: the chiming guitars and airy electronic supporting chords; Chikudate’s light, almost too sweet soprano. But, as shoegaze,
Hush fails to rise to the intensity of M83 (see the 2008 music survey) or Kitchens of Distinction, while, as dream pop, it lacks the compositional sophistication of
School of Seven Bells (again, see the 2008 music survey) or Broadcast (see below). It is telling that one of the best songs is the most conventional of all: the deliberately paced “Blind Little Rain,” soulful and affecting without all the sonic overlay. The song drops out for a minute at the end, returning briefly as faint keyboard glimmerings to close out the record. There are some oddities in the titling of songs: “Glacially” is actually taken at a moderately fast tempo, and, while layering is a quintessential element of Asobi Seksu’s music, the innocuous “Layers” is not one of the band’s more multitextured tunes. More so, and more closely echoing the material from
Citrus, is the composition that follows “Layers” at the beginning of the track list, “Familiar Light,” with Chikudate’s voice gleaming like a beacon of consonance over a sea of shimmering electronic waves and drum machine foam peaks, guiding the listener to a puddle of white noise at the end of the journey (a bigger pool of reverb shows up later on the disc, as “Me & Mary” fades away). “Transparence” is lifted from the same schematic but adds a new dimension of chromaticism at its bridge and builds in volume and
urgency toward the close. “Glacially” is worth a listen for its boinging guitar timbres and unusual chord progressions. On the otherwise undistinguished “I Can’t See,” Hanna and Chikudate uncharacteristically take turns swapping lead vocals, verse and chorus. There are, unhappily, too many tracks that go nowhere, making
Hush a woeful puppy, a gauzy, syrupy, resounding letdown.
B/B-
AU REVOIR SIMONE, Still Night, Still Light—In a word, dreck. Sugarcoated and genteel but still dreck. Drum machines produce automaton rhythms; chord progressions are nursery school simple; arpeggiations are as regular as can be; lyrics are insipid or stupefyingly unpoetic in their literal-mindedness. To put it another way, there is no sense of adventure or surprise in the
delicately chaste and music-box-tinny sound of Au Revoir Simone, at least judging by the evidence of the group’s third release,
Still Night, Still Light. Occasionally, as in the verse section of “Shadows” or the refrain of the otherwise wordless “Only You Can Make Me Happy,” the “Simones” succeed in concocting something mildly catchy, while the opening riff of “Organized Scenery” is filched from a 1970s or early 1980s pop song whose title I cannot recall. Even the band’s name is cutesy; it comes from a line Pee Wee Herman uttered in the movie
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985). The
Brooklyn-based trio consists of Erika Forster, Annie Hart, and Heather D’Angelo, all of whom sing and play keyboards. The favorable press it has received in places like
Spin and
NME is baffling, except that such writers generally are not paid to pan bands. I was intrigued to see in the credits that among the many the group thanks are Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of Air (see above); Au Revoir Simone is like a female version of Air on autopilot.
C
BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW, Eating Us—Dubbed “
Pittsburgh weirdos” by Pitchfork Media,
Black Moth Super Rainbow has been, if not entirely neglected by the tastemaker herd, largely overlooked. This is a shame because
Eating Us, as peculiar as it is, has a sublime beauty making it one of the year’s better releases. The group’s founding genius, Tom Fec, who goes by the alias Tobacco, heavily distorts his voice through a vocoder, which some will find alienating, and
further obscures his identity by wearing masks when performing live. Other band members hide behind flower-children names like
Power Pill Fist (who left the band around the time this recording was made, to be replaced as bassist by Ryan Graveface), Father Hummingbird (keyboards), Iffernaut (drums), and The Seven Fields of Aphelion (keyboards). The group’s sound is buzzy, fuzzy, and—although Tobacco does not like the term—psychedelic, borrowing freely from the freak-folk, neo-progressive, and dream pop movements. It is heavy on synthesizers, some of them apparently of museum quality: Moogs, the Novatron (a kind of Mellotron), as well as the Fender Rhodes electric piano. Tobacco wrote most or all of the music himself, which may hint at why Power Pill Fist left in favor of other creative ventures. The credits given for the CD are sketchy in the extreme; notably, however, Dave Fridmann of the Flaming Lips served as producer. Certainly,
Eating Us does not overstay its welcome: its twelve tracks (only eleven are identified in the book jacket) last less than thirty-six minutes in all. Like Air (see above) or Sigur Rós (see the 2008 music survey), there is something elfin about this band. The vocoder processes Tobacco’s voice into a breathy, quasi-feminine, buttery spread, although at the cost of eclipsing the lyrics. Melodies are fairly simple and stay within the confines of consonance; it is the cushiony arrangements, and those bizarre vocals, that lead critics to use words like “mind-blowing” and “interstellar” to describe the sound. “Twin of Myself,” for example, with its tinkly effects, chirpy overtones, and bubbly, pumping percussion, like something from the cheesier side of 1970s R&B, would be comical if it were not so damned appealing. “Gold Splatter” starts out relatively unadorned, just a bit of guitar and drums backing those otherworldly vocals, but as it adds density through layers of synths, it becomes a prog-rock anthem worthy of the
Flaming Lips themselves. “Bubblegum Animals” is another serene little vignette that teleports back to the progressive rockers of the seventies. Tobacco has the compositional skill to make a tune sound as if it were obvious or inevitable—as in the opener, “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise,” elaborating on a basic descending scale to create something that sounds simultaneously cool and slightly unsettling. “
American Face Dust” adds a touch of banjo to ground the dreamy cascades of keyboards working out all too easy tonic-dominant resolutions. The untitled final piece lasts less than ninety seconds and is wordless and lighter in
texture—just some pining synthetic woodwind flights of fancy over delicate acoustic guitar filigree. “Tooth Decay” speaks of blowing bubbles, and then there is “Dark Bubbles”; the music of
Black Moth Super Rainbow makes me think back to a guy I spotted a few days into my college career, releasing soap bubbles across campus from a high window and watching them float away with a beatific if drug-addled
delight.
A/A-
BLANK DOGS, Under and Under—Blank Dogs is, the plural name notwithstanding, one guy in
Brooklyn, Mike Sniper, with a lot of equipment at his disposal.
Under and Under is his debut release on CD, though an earlier recording circulated on cassette tape. The sound is postpunk, more than a little grungy, stripped down and basic in terms of melody and rhythm, revealing influences of both garage rock and the
shoegaze movement.
Rolling Stone described it as “Joy Division stuck in a tape deck,” though there are of course problems with such glib summations. Credits on the CD are sketchy, but a neo-psychedelia musician named
Gary War and guitarist JB Townsend of the
indie band
Crystal Stilts appear on the songs “L Machine” and “Blue Lights,” and the dreadful Vivian Girls (see the 2008 music survey) provide unobtrusive backup vocals on a handful of numbers. Drummer Ryan Naideau plays on a couple of tracks, but the album does not bother to specify which. I do not know for sure but would guess that Sniper uses drum machine programming for the rest, while he plays keyboards and guitars and sings. His vocal style is soft and aspirated but rough-edged, sandpapery, with a Dylanesque indifference to pitch, and he is seemingly recorded many inches away from the microphone, making the vocals sound remote—I am put in mind of Marc Ribot’s voice, though Blank Dogs’ music sounds little like the more cerebral experimentalism of Marc Ribot’s
Ceramic Dog. The songs do not range widely in terms of style or tempo, and all are about three minutes long, so the record has no significant peaks or troughs. Several songs seem to stop in midcourse, as if works in progress. The music is not terribly inventive or surprising, but it has a certain vibrancy and virility behind all those fuzztones and insistently repeating bass chords that make it an agreeable listening experience for those not put off by postpunk’s grimy elementalism. The two tracks with
Gary War and JB Townsend are more densely layered with electronics and feature two male voices (War’s and Sniper’s, I assume) in concert. The opening two chords of “The New Things” sound like the beginning of Radiohead’s (see below) “Airbag” (the rest of the song does not). I appreciate the propulsion and somewhat cleaner guitar/synth sounds of “Falling Back.” Also likable is “Tin Birds,” although the main thing that sets it apart from the earlier “Setting Fire to Your House” is a sunnier chorus.
B+/B
BOMBA ESTÉREO, Blow Up—Bomba Estéreo hails from Bogotá, but the group’s spiritual locus is the
Caribbean coast, cradle of the
cumbia and home to lead singer Liliana Saumet. The music, electro-cumbia, posits one future for
Colombian pop: trippy, garlanded with club beats, drawing on traditional Afro-Colombian
champeta, dub, and reggaeton. The songwriting team of band founder and bass guitarist Simón Mejía and Saumet is the nucleus of Bomba Estéreo, which also includes Kike Egurrola and Diego Cadavid on drums and percussion. For the recording of
Blow Up, Julian Salazar was brought in as lead guitarist, and
Santiago Ospino plays the
flauta de millo, a small cane flute with a large, mournful sound that is close to that of a soprano saxophone. Saumet sings in Spanish, with a smattering of English phrases in “
Cosita Rica” and “Feelin’.” The big, bring-the-house-to-its-feet number is “Fuego,” which is more about the resounding, clomping beat than about any melodic values, as Saumet spits out the Spanish lyrics: “Fire! Keep it burning! Fire! Don’t let it go out!” She is an electric performer with a strong if somewhat nasal voice, yet the song is more pulse-racing exercise than artistic achievement. The rest of the record for the most part also conforms to the clip-clop rhythms of the cumbia. “Juana” musters a genuine, plangent melody, though it is
never developed beyond the kernel of an idea, set against a straight-up dance rhythm rather than cumbia. The haunting quality of the minor-mode theme, accentuated by the
flauta de millo at the end, carries over into the instrumental “
Camino Evitar” (
Avoidance Road), sounding as if the two were a single track sliced at a strategic point, and even into “Agua Salá” (Saltwater), by which point the cane flute has died away. In its darker moods, as on “Agua Salá,” Bomba Estéreo evokes the sultry Latin electronica of Si*Sé. “Feelin’” replicates the heavy beat of “Fuego,” with words that Saumet raps, alternating between Spanish and English; much of “La Boquilla,” “Música Acción” (Action Music), and the early portion of “Pa’ti” (For You) are rapped as well. “Pa’ti” is spacy in its electronic effects, yet with just the most embryonic of melodic exposition, played against a simple arpeggiated harmony in the bass. The music of Bomba Estéreo is an intriguing hybrid, and we may be witnessing the birth of a new subgenre. But there is no shortage of places to turn if all you want is chanting and beats—too much of the material on
Blow Up is nondescript to make the record more than a mere precursor of something worthwhile.
B+/B
TYONDAI BRAXTON, Central Market—Braxton the younger (his father, Anthony Braxton, appears in the jazz section below) is best known now as a member of the group
Battles, whose debut record
Mirrored came out in 2007 to great acclaim (see the 2007 music survey). But he has been involved in solo composition and performance projects since his teenage years (which were not all that long ago).
Central Market is his second full-length effort. It is characterized by the usual Tyondai Braxton bag of tricks: tape loop layering, Disneyesque kazoos and whistling and the sort of cartoonishly high vocals—one critic aptly called them Munchkin-esque—that appeared on
Mirrored as well. The principal departure is the appearance on several tracks of the Wordless Music Orchestra, led by violinist-violist Caleb Burhans (also a member of Alarm Will Sound—see below, in the classical section). The prominent place given to legitimate string, wind, and horn players makes this record hard to categorize: at times, it sounds quite a lot like
Battles; at other times, very modern classical; sometimes like neither one. Braxton in interviews has cited influences from
Edgard Varèse to
Carl Stalling, who composed for Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. The central piece on
Central Market, the ten-minute-plus “Platinum Rows,” is certainly hyperactive and noisy but ultimately not terribly interesting, a major weakness considering that it constitutes a quarter of the album’s length. The early ensemble work by the orchestra on “Platinum Rows” sounds boisterously
industrious, like something a mid-twentieth-century
American composer might have written, but this and later string passages are offset by those kazoos, whizzy electronic zaps and whooshes and that annoyingly insistent “Munchkin” chorus, hitting the eardrums with the percussive force of an anvil from the Acme Manufacturing Co. on the Roadrunner cartoons. This could be seen as humorizing the attempt at serious composition, but, in this context, it strikes me as trivializing as well as cacophonous. By contrast, “Opening Bell,” the first piece on the record, has an easygoing playfulness: even the more or less strictly “classical” passages played by the Wordless Music Orchestra are a romp, and that is before the whistles and birdcalls and xylophone runs and electronic pings join in. Why the opening composition “works” better than “Platinum Rows” is hard to say; it is lighter and not as obsessive/compulsive, and there are no Munchkins in earshot. Likewise charmingly engaging is “The Duck and the Butcher,” in which the web-footed character is represented by kazoo and the other title character seemingly by a combination of violin and viola. Their pas de deux is mediated by a mouth harp. For reasons known only to Braxton, however, the song abandons all sense of hijinks midway and becomes mechanistic—perhaps the duck has entered the slaughterhouse? “Unfurling” is a short track that simulates ambient electronic music—all sustained swells and roars, reverberations, humpback whale-like squeals and moans, and clattering sounds. “Uffe’s Woodshop” (named for the Danish architect Uffe Surland Van Tams, who is also photographed on the back cover of the CD as the “Rainbow Architect”) is a Battles-like composition, brief but with a lot going on: a fast-ticking metronome, rhythmic head fakes, and aggressive churning in the electronics. My favorite track on the record is the most rock-oriented, though, “J. City.” It draws its power from deep, thrumming bass chords from Braxton’s guitar, above which he sings in his normal voice, making the quantum leap to falsetto when it suits him. The song’s regular rhythm dissolves (matched by Braxton’s firm singing of the verse melting into sighs) and then reconstitutes itself with a vengeance before dissipating once more—cool stuff. “
Dead Strings,” the final composition, is slow and heavily percussive—until it becomes fast and heavily percussive—with a sprinkling of staccato scatting by Braxton. It also makes use of a
waterphone, an odd, water-filled device that is sort of a cross between a percussion and a string instrument.
A-/B+
BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age—
Wire magazine honored this disc as its album of the year, and with good reason: it is an exquisitely wrought jewel, exotic, inventive, and occult.
Called a “mini-album” in the press releases, it actually spans nearly fifty minutes. Many of its twenty-three tracks are naturally fragmentary. I have not followed the prior course of the English group Broadcast, so I cannot tell how the new record with its exceptionally long name deviates from previous efforts, but the band’s James Cargill, in interviews, acknowledges its debt to the 1960s psychedelia group the
United States of America. For the new disc, the Birmingham-based outfit—once a foursome but now down to just Cargill and vocalist Trish Keenan—teamed up with the Focus Group, which is the electronic music project of
U.K. designer Julian House. House, who has done album covers for Broadcast in the past (as well as for Stereolab and others), designed this one as well, a multicolored but largely red phantasmagoria.
Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age plays like the love child of Stereolab (see the 2008 music survey) and “Revolution 9.” Those who were transfixed by that Beatles experiment from 1968 can feast on an entire record of similar material, heavy on the sampling, jarringly disjointed (but hardly random), determinedly mysterious. The hazy aura and blurred and overlapping sounds also bring to mind the dreamlike atmospherics of Scottish electronica outfit Boards of Canada, and influences from
Britain’s
trip-hop movement filter in as well. There is not much in the way of conventional song structure, but what there is is worth treasuring. The nursery-like melody following the introduction, “The Be Colony,” is distinctly redolent of midcareer Stereolab, with its slow modulating triplet patterns, electronic echoes and shivers, and Keenan’s soft, subdued voice emulating that of Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier. Keenan’s next (brief) appearance as vocalist is not until track seven, “I See, So I See So,” in which she is intoning a dainty, even a bit too precious, tune over harpsichord accompaniment, with the sound of seagulls and waves in the background. She is gently incantatory in “A Seancing Song,” backed by a dizzying figuration in the guitar and perhaps a mandolin, undisturbed by the imposition of doorlatches rattling and phones buzzing noisily. In “Libra, the Mirror’s Minor Self,” her drowsy voice drops in for a couple of rounds of four-line verse but is nearly lost amid the psychedelic swirl. “Make My Sleep His Song” has Keenan in choirgirl mode, chanting sweetly to the low strains of a churchly organ, and on “What I Saw,” her voice is multiplied to become a full choir, again singing an elementary, consonant tune in the manner of a naïf, embellished by the twittering of birdsong. A sampling of her singing the “Be Colony” theme is reprised, clashing with a doleful bass guitar line set at a different tempo and rhythm, in the finale. Also very much in the style of Stereolab is the chiming phrase, sneakily skipping one beat, that starts off “Royal Chant”; no chant here, just the singer speaking barely audible lines, à la Miho Hatori and Cibo Matto, intertwined with the pulsing of the music. “Royal Chant” soon shifts its attention elsewhere, landing eventually on a combination of baying dogs and organ chords. Elsewhere, we hear church bells, electronic zooms and whooshes, geese/ducks quacking,
breaking or tumbling bottles, snatches of lute and harp sounds, a throaty recorder, an earthy flute, a classical choir (sampled in “Round and Round and Round”), bits that briefly rock hard (in “How Do You Get Along Sir?” and “Drug Party”), and a taste of the mystic Near East in the oboe motif played in “Reception/Group Therapy.”
Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age is an arcade of funhouse mirrors that is a
delight to pass through.
A
THE DECEMBERISTS, The Hazards of Love—Call it a song cycle or a one-act rock operetta (the band’s
Colin Meloy prefers “folk opera”),
The Hazards of Love does not lack for artistic ambition. Esthetically, it falls well shy of the high bar it sets, but there is still some good music within. The plot synopsis in brief: a woman named Margaret, presumably noble (she rides a horse, after all), finds an injured fawn in a field in southern
Scotland; upon her taking pity on the creature, it turns into a man, William. Their budding love upsets William’s mother, the Queen, at which point William attempts to bargain with her for one night with his love before returning to her service. Then a man called the Rake abducts Margaret and, with supernatural help from the Queen, escapes across the river Annan. The Rake’s murdered (by his own hand) children come back to haunt him. Meanwhile, William pleads with the river to let him pass, offering to sacrifice himself if granted safe passage across. The final scene apparently culminates in the pair of lovers drowning in the river as William attempts rescue, though it is left ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation. Hazards of love
indeed! From a theatrical perspective, the problem is that the dramatic arc barely gets off the ground, so there is no real catharsis. We are
never emotionally involved with either of the lovers, reducing the audience to detached witnesses to their fate. Motives can be murky as well; it is
never entirely clear why the Queen is so murderously possessive of her adopted son. Finally, it is hard to draw any moral lessons from this confused folk tale; the lovers have no evident character
flaws, and the only sins that appear punished in any measure are those of the Rake. The lyrics, or libretto, if you prefer, all written by Decemberists lead singer and songwriter Colin Meloy in a style somewhere between medieval lay and rural English fairy tale, vary in quality from laughable (when self-consciously striving for an “antique” feel) to sublime. (The use of the word “taiga” is odd since it applies, if at all in the
British Isles, only to the far-flung Scottish Highlands.) Meloy also wrote all the music, with the exception of the instrumental Prelude, which was penned by the band’s keyboardist Jenny Conlee as a slow buildup of sustained organ tones with string and vocal backing that sounds a bit too much like a movie soundtrack. I think Meloy also made a strategic mistake by deciding to sing both the male roles himself, as well as the narrator. Surely, there were others he could have brought in; already, he has Jim James of My Morning Jacket singing backing vocals. Robyn Hitchcock (see below), who sings his own material elsewhere, makes an appearance solely to play electric guitar during the brief instrumental Interlude. Meloy’s nasal tenor, somewhat like Al Stewart’s (for those who remember the 1970s) or Eric Idle’s of Monty Python, is not particularly to my liking, but it will serve for the the innocent and idealistic William. To sing the part of the Rake, a deeper voice, filled with scheming and intrigue and
malice, ought to have been sought out. As for the female voices, they are expertly handled by soprano
Becky Stark (in the role of Margaret) of the
L.A. folk-pop quartet Lavender Diamond and, in a lower range with a Grace Slick-like quality, Shara Worden (the Queen), who performs on her own as My Brightest Diamond. The spirits of the murdered offspring of the Rake, appearing in “The Hazards of Love 3 (
Revenge!),” are ably sung in the form of a children’s chamber chorus by
Natalie Briare, Clara Ell, and Joseph Ell. So the album is unsatisfying as drama; what about the music per se? The stylistic range is impressive, from unadorned folk to crunching bass guitar chords in “A Bower Scene” or its musical reprise, “The Abduction of Margaret,” to bittersweet country rock (making use of pedal steel guitar, banjo, “
Nashville guitar”) in the finale, “The Hazards of Love 4 (
The Drowned).” At different times, the band sounds like the Tin Hat Trio (old-timey, rustic, off-color strings adding depth and dimension to the otherwise unremarkable major-mode theme of “Isn’t It a Lovely Day”), Gomez (the gently mournful, countryish ballad that is “The Hazards of Love 4”), Procol Harum (the organ chords and tremolos in the slow refrain of “Annan Water”), even
Arcade Fire (Worden’s high harmonizing on “The Wanting Comes in Waves” is strikingly reminiscent of Regine Chassagne of that Canadian band, though why the Queen is harmonizing her son’s desires at a point in the drama where the two are at loggerheads is another headache for the dramaturge). The acoustic tunes, like “The Hazards of Love 1 (
The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)” or the verse portion of “Margaret in Captivity,” which were meant to echo English and Gaelic folk song, invariably end up parroting
Donovan,
Van Morrison, or
Cat Stevens in the
Tea for the Tillerman era. Conlee switches to harpsichord for some of the more baroquely ornate passages, in “The Wanting Comes in Waves”—an ironic title, given the plot denouement—and (together with squeaky, conscience-grating strings) to accompany the children’s voices as they reproach their father in “The Hazards of Love 3.” A quartet of string players joins the band for some numbers. For all the overarching theatrical difficulties, “Won’t Want for Love (
Margaret in the Taiga)” nicely captures the heroine’s
wistful yearnings, and the love scene in the succeeding “The Hazards of Love 2 (
Wager All) is touchingly tender. Although
Colin Meloy’s pretensions exceed his artistic talents on
The Hazards of Love, in a way that
induces shudders, much of the music is truly stirring. With some reworking at the hands of a skilled playwright or librettist, there might yet be the makings of a true pop opera here.
B+/B
DIRTY PROJECTORS, Bitte Orca—The strange album title—just two words that sounded good together to bandleader Dave Longstreth—maybe it is a response to “gut gemacht, sperm whale”? Or “danke schön, Zoo
Duisburg Delphinarium”? Dirty Projectors is an
indie band with shifting membership and collaborators over the decade (with Longstreth the one constant), as well as varying aims (the band has done a Black Flag tribute album and a concept record about Don Henley) that make it hard to pin down. For
Bitte Orca, Longstreth, who wrote nearly all the music, moves into more conventional folk-rock territory, with particular emphasis on expressive singing. As he has become more smitten with female voices, he has added women to the lineup: for the current record, Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian trade off with Longstreth’s own tenor/quasi-falsetto to sing lead vocals, backed up on about half the tracks by Haley Dekle, who joined the group after the record’s release. (Nat Baldwin also joined as bass guitarist subsequent to the issuing of the CD, on which he plays on “Cannibal Resource” and “Useful Chamber.”) The outcome is, like the band itself, all over the map. Most egregiously, “Useful Chamber” abruptly jumps between sections with no connective tissue. It is like four unrelated songs in the course of its six and a half minutes, the first a moderate tempo tune sung by Longstreth amid electric keyboard tones (even this one section rambles aimlessly), followed by what is almost a rap, set against only a drumbeat; next come the girls, singing rather harshly at first, then mellowing; and, finally, following a restatement of the initial theme, a volley of electric guitars is thrown in to end this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink composition. “Temecula Sunrise” was inspired by the sight of sprawling new housing on the edge of nowheresville, southern
California, contemplating the improbability of it all and whether its future will be very different from what the builders intended. The song itself has an odd stop-start pacing, and the singing is not wonderful, but it works as an ode to offbeat
Americana. The album’s starter, “Cannibal Resource,” makes better use of the band’s vocal resources, as Coffman, Deradoorian, and Dekle all pitch in to harmonize Longstreth’s plain-spun melody, set nicely to simple guitar accompaniment. “Remade Horizon” is a little more elaborate in structure than “Cannibal Resource” but is patterned the same way, with the women singing the chorus in counterpoint to Longstreth over electric guitar picking. The other track that hangs together well musically is “Stillness Is the Move,” co-written by Coffman and featuring her singing, supported by Deradoorian, in a gentle groove of a number—framed by a heavy drum pattern and repeating keyboard figuration—that would fit seamlessly on a recording by Rihanna or Beyoncé, ultimately subsiding in a warm bath of string quartet concertizing. The following song, “Two Doves,” in turn showcases Deradoorian’s huskier voice, soloing against just an acoustic guitar and string ornamentation; it is the sparest song on the record, pleasant if a little dull. Although I like the pentatonic-scale runs that spice the rhythm track of “No Intention,” that tune and the remainder are of little consequence on this inconsistent, meandering record.
B
ESPERS, III—
Philadelphia-based
Espers is a purveyor of nouveau folk with touches of psychedelia, paying respects to
U.K. folk acts of the 1960s, such as Fairport Convention, to which it is sometimes compared. Stylistically, what the band is about is similar to what the Decemberists are aiming for on
The Hazards of Love (see above), yet Espers’ record sounds very different than the quasi-operatic, folk-progressive Decemberists disc. The music on
III (which is actually the band’s fourth release but the third of original material; there was one album of covers,
The Weed Tree), while not exactly stripped down and unadorned, does have a plainsong folk
essence. Song structures are fairly simple, and the singers enunciate clearly over the accompaniment, which is often spare notwithstanding the use of electric guitars and keyboards—at times a heavy enough stress on synthesizers to sound like early 1970s Genesis. Tempos are easygoing, frequently in 6/8 meter. Meg Baird’s singing is capable, but I do not favor her kind of voice, thick-textured yet not rich,
breathy in a Janis Ian kind of way. Bandleader and songwriter Greg Weeks sings mainly supporting vocals. The group’s lineup has changed somewhat over the years: originally a trio of Weeks, Baird, and acoustic guitarist Brooke Sietinsons, then a sextet, it is down to five now with the departure of bassist Chris Smith. I have
never been much of a folk follower, but Espers is very good at what it does, slyly updating the genre and putting its personal stamp on it. There are a few duller tracks on
III, but these are more than balanced out by the gems. Most exquisite of all is “Another Moon Song,” a lovely melody at a relaxed tempo in 4/4, carried largely by Baird’s voice over Sietinsons’s guitar accompaniment, but with subtle synth overtones adding a bit of nocturnal mystery, while electric guitars become a more insistent presence as the song progresses. “Caroline” is a brief, slight, winsome theme embellished by keening, perambulating curlicues of synthesizer, ranging from straightforward accompaniment to shrill flights of fancy. Another sparkling little piece is “Sightings,” a Gaelic-sounding lay whose delicate, gently swaying vocal solo is punctuated by a droopy descending pattern in the strings; the song is marred only briefly by an inert synthesizer passage that limply constitutes a bridge. “That Which Darkly Thrives” provides some welcome contrast as the most synthetic and moodiest composition on the record, glowering in its studied mysticism. “Trollslända,” whose title is Swedish for “dragonfly,” is a wonderful closing piece, mellow without lapsing into slackness, glowingly consonant yet avoiding the traps of triteness or predictability through periodic major-minor chord shifts and a bridge section that is denser and darker than the rest. Baird and Weeks softly duet over tremulous strings, including a solo turn from Helena Espvall’s cello.
A-
FANFARLO, Reservoir—To describe Fanfarlo as the poor man’s
Arcade Fire would be uncharitable and patronizing yet not wholly inaccurate. The band’s old-timey horn and string arrangements, the waltz rhythms and anthemic marches, the handclapping, the grainy
texture of the cello/violin bowing that calls forth a homey nostalgia matching the sepia tones of the front- and back-cover photographs on the CD jacket, all bear the stamp of the renowned
Canadian band. Even the timbre and style of Simon Balthazar’s singing are a near match for Win Butler’s of Arcade Fire, if Balthazar’s voice is feebler and more tentative. Although Balthazar, the band’s founder, who also plays a wide range of string and wind instruments and even a bit of glockenspiel, is a Swede, the band is based in
London, and
Reservoir was recorded with the
American producer Peter Katis in
Bridgeport, Connecticut. Subsequent to the recording, the erstwhile six-member band lost guitarist/keyboard specialist Mark West, who went off to start his own band, the Lost Cavalry. Fanfarlo’s fanciful name comes from a Charles Baudelaire novella. Because its songs are less emotionally freighted than those of
Arcade Fire, there seems to be less at stake. “The Walls Are Coming Down” is nicely orchestrated for violin, mandolin, and glock, to a heavy 3/4 beat, but the lyrics are platitudinous and inconsequential, robbing the piece of soul-stirring potential. More interesting from a lyrical standpoint is “Harold T. Wilkins, or How to Wait for a Very Long Time,” a title that reads like something from the early days of Genesis; telling a tale about alienation and escaping the routine, it contains the verse, “Your dreams will become part of the future and coincide with the past.” Musically, though, the song is too brisk for its own good; it flashes by declaratively in four minutes without touching a nerve. By contrast, the preceding song, “If It Is Growing,” slow and contemplative, is one of the most appealing tunes on the disc. “Drowning Men,” intended as a single, is propelled by a pulse-pounding piano line, but the melody Balthazar intones above it is pallid, again, sapping the song of any sense of import; toward the end, the percussive current drops away, leaving things to wind down in a sheltered cove of voice and strings. Generally, the band is better the more its sound does approximate Arcade Fire, as on the first three songs: the clomping yet majestic rhythms of “I’m a Pilot” drive a piercing, songful melody; “Ghosts” adroitly executes several shifts between rousing,
vigorous dotted-note rhythms laced with handclaps and stop-time passages, with Leon Beckenham subtly harmonizing the sung theme on trumpet and Cathy Lucas on violin; the foot-stomping beats of “Luna” (even if supporting a tenuous and undercooked melody) give way to a march tempo and ultimately to a serene conclusion led by the melodica. When the band starts to move away from that model, as on “Finish Line,” it courts dullness. The disc concludes with a little instrumental, “Good Morning Midnight,” a tender if slight acoustic guitar theme with bells and spectral keyboard tones.
B+/B
THE FIERY FURNACES, I’m Going Away—Maybe someone gave the Friedberger siblings, Matthew and
Eleanor, a prescription for Ritalin prior to the making of
I’m Going Away. The attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder that characterized their music is banished for the time being in favor of more tuneful themes expressed in a relaxed manner, rather than being put through the labors of Hercules. And the results are winning: the Furnaces’ best album since 2006’s
Bitter Tea. Since the Friedbergers are relentlessly experimental, determined to do something different each time out, do not expect them to abide by the motto “keep it simple, stupid” from now on. I should stress, however, that complex and tortured is not necessarily bad; that certainly describes the magnificent
Bitter Tea. I’m Going Away is a little folkier than previous Fiery Furnaces releases. The conceit seems to be that the band is reworking and repurposing snatches of old ballads and commercial tunes, the sorts of things people across the country might have
gathered in the parlor to sing a century or more ago. Yet the compositions are entirely novel, with the typical division of labor:
Eleanor writes the lyrics, and Matthew then fashions the music. When it comes to performing, Eleanor takes lead vocals, with Matthew backing her on guitar, keyboards, and with his own voice. The pair also bring in Jason Lowenstein to play bass and Robert D’Amico, percussion. Eleanor’s words are hard to make heads or tails of (example: “When the birds in
Georgia sing of
Tennessee/Fifty miles from
Boston”); still, the imagery, ranging across the globe, through history, and into the deepest recesses of the human psyche, is original and evocative. The words to “Cups & Punches” are a slight variant on those of “Charmaine
Champagne,” appearing earlier on the record, yet this is no mere reprise. Musically, the
deliberately paced “Cups & Punches” could not be more different from the peppy “Charmaine
Champagne,” except that Matthew cleverly sneaks in a motivic link in their common refrain, “She’s gonna get me folked up, fairly beat.” In “Cups & Punches,” the character is rendered in the CD booklet as “Charmaine
Champaign” (as in the home of the
University of
Illinois); I do not know if this is a misprint or
deliberate on the part of the
Illinois native Eleanor. Aside from “Charmaine
Champagne,” the only uptempo number is the title track, which begins the session. Matthew has come up with a number of toothsome bonbons for
I’m Going Away, none more so than the poignant auxiliary theme of “Lost at Sea,” appearing at the beginning and end of the piece and once sandwiched in between iterations of the more ordinary principal melody. He also finds soul-touching melodies for the reflective “The End Is Near,” the quasi-mystical “Keep Me in the Dark,” and “Even in the Rain,” which deftly shifts moods and key signatures between verse and chorus. Occasionally, Matthew cannot resist slipping in a banana peel (old reflexes), like the sudden, brief acceleration toward the end of “Drive to Dallas,” an otherwise languid, bluesy song, or the peculiar device of having the first few measures of the slow “Lost at Sea” tick at a faster pace than the rest. The midtempo “Take Me Round Again,” with a rollicking refrain that comes around a half-dozen or so times, is exemplary of a tune fashioned out of old-fangled-sounding bits like a
Belle Epoque singalong (other than those bizarre lyrics about Georgia birds outside of Boston pining for the Volunteer State) and as such makes for a warmly affirmative conclusion to the record.
A/A-
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS, I Told You I Was Freaky—Flight of the Conchords is more a comedy duo than a real band, but there is always room in the music survey for novelty acts if they are good, and Flight of the Conchords is very, very good. Originally appearing as a BBC radio program, it then became an HBO television series premised on two wide-eyed, ingenuous
New Zealanders trying to make it as folk-rockers on
Manhattan’s
Lower East Side. Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie (their actual names) are not just fish out of water on the TV show but react to every surprise, opportunity, and disappointment
New York tosses their way with the same blank-faced placidity bordering on catatonia. Of course, behind the façade, they are savvier and more emotionally engaged. The thirteen short songs on this collection run from the merely droll (“Friends,” “Angels”) to the side-splitting. For a band billed as folkies, there is not much on
I Told You I Was Freaky that could be characterized as folk, although the final three songs make the grade. In fact, as the album title suggests, much of the material has an “
urban” (
African-American) sensibility, whether hip-hop or rhythm and blues. But the song styles conform to the circumstances of their creation. “Rambling through the Avenues of Time,” a solo reverie from Bret, interspersed with biting commentary from Jemaine,
essentially rips off the theme and the yarn-spinning format of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973), minus the harmonica-accented chorus (and minus the piano!). “You Don’t Have to Be a Prostitute” is a gender-switched riff on “Roxanne” (1978) by the
Police, reggae rhythms and all, while the uproarious “Carol Brown,” in which Jemaine bickers with a bevy of his exes—who are in accusatory high dudgeon—and wonders “who organised all of my ex-girlfriends into a chorus and got them to sing?” is a role-reversed “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” (1975) by Paul Simon. “Fashion Is Danger” is appropriately glam-disco, in the tradition of David Bowie or RuPaul. “Petrov, Yelyena, and Me” is a particularly ghoulish (but comical) take on a sea chantey, with the female voice contributed by Kristen Schaal, who is also a character in the TV series. “Demon Woman” plays around with a time-honored rock cliché (from Cliff Richard to the Electric Light Orchestra), spoofing it with lines like “How’d you magic my clothes off?” Certain songs work better in the context of the television episodes from which they were drawn; thus, the happenstance listener might be baffled by “Friends” (in which one of the duo tells Murray, their manager, that his fly is down) or the casual R&B “We’re Both in Love with a Sexy Lady” (from a situation showing Bret and Jemaine both smitten by the same woman, played by Kristen Wiig of
Saturday Night Live, with an “epileptic dog”). The freakiest and most bizarre song is, naturally, the title track, a tour de force of eccentric exhibitionism that morphs into a falsetto trio section, before bringing back the mock-funk while shifting to a major key in its final section. “Sugalumps” is a boisterous sexual rap in the spirit of “The Humpty Dance” (1990) by Digital Underground. “Too Many Dicks (on the Dance Floor)” is self-explanatory, but the song does have a cool, funky vibe and steady beat—if you can stop laughing at the rapid-fire laments long enough to dance. Funniest of all is the opening track, “Hurt Feelings,” in which put-upon rappers reveal their sensitive side, to the sad chiming of a glockenspiel. It is like Rodney Dangerfield’s “Rappin’ Rodney” (1983) updated for the new century: these guys just cannot get any respect! Besides Kristen Schaal, other comedians contributing to the record are Arj Barker and Jim Gaffigan. There are also some legitimate musicians, such as David Ralicke on clarinet (on “Rambling through the Avenues of Time”) and Gus Seyffert and Josh Schwartz on guitar (“We’re Both in Love with a Sexy Woman” and “Demon Woman,” respectively), and Sia (Furler) adds her sweet Aussie pipes to “You Don’t Have to Be a Prostitute” and “Carol Brown.”
I Told You I Was Freaky is strong enough to stand up to dozens of hearings without getting old.
A/A-
FLORENCE + THE MACHINE, Lungs—Unlike Micachu (see below),
Florence + the Machine secured a Mercury Prize (U.K.) nomination for
Lungs, which is as polished as Micachu’s
Jewellery is rough—and is also a far more conventional pop album. The backing band, although its members contribute to the songwriting, is very much a framing device for the emerging stardom of lead singer
Florence Welch, whose long limbs and flowing red tresses are camera-friendly. She has lead or co-writing credits on nearly every song on the album. As for her voice, it is strong and clear yet somehow lacking in character; she is reaching for a soulfulness, at times by leaping into her upper register, that strikes the listener as false, perhaps because it is not schooled by experience. This shortcoming is most blatant on the closing number, “You’ve Got the Love,” which is aiming for a transcendent spirituality. But it mars other slow and midtempo numbers like “I’m Not Calling You a Liar” and “My Boy Builds Coffins.” She redeems herself with more convincing performances on the rousing “Hurricane Drunk” and the bluesy “Girl with One Eye,” which captures the sensuality of Camille Dalmais’s star turn on the Nouvelle Vague cover of “Guns of Brixton” from 2004. The band’s debut record has its moments but suffers overall from boringness—too many pedestrian offerings. At its worst, it emulates the heroic vainglory and sticky bombast of Evanescence, as on “Howl,” “Drumming Song,” or “Blinding.” The truculent lyrics of “Kiss with a Fist” make me wonder about just how spicy Welch’s sex life is, but the song has a raw vitality that stands out from the remainder of the album. The best and catchiest tunes are the first two on the record, “Dog Days Are Over” and “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up),” each of which charted successfully in
Britain. Both have a radiance and emotional resonance, tucked into intelligently economical compositions, whose early promise the rest of the disc mostly fails to live up to. The album’s production is elaborate, rich in string and harp accompaniment (on “Hurricane Drunk,” the harp provides both a motoric element and glissando filigree). Irritatingly, the CD booklet contains not lyrics but snatches of verses, together with plenty of gauzy pictures of the then twenty-two-year-old
Florence Welch in various states of dress and undress.
B
FORRO IN THE DARK, Light a Candle—Wildly uneven in quality, Forro in the Dark’s second full-length album was one of the year’s big letdowns. There are a couple of songs on
Light a Candle (sung in English, with dreadful lyrics) that are simply embarrassing. On the countervailing front, nothing on the record counts as outstanding, though the traditional “Forró de Dois Amigos” (Forró of Two Friends) comes close. Written by Edmilson do Pífano, a still active performer from
Caruaru, in the interior of
Brazil’s Pernambuco state, it is a virtuoso piece for the player of the
pífano, a small wooden fife popular in northeastern
Brazil. On “Forró de Dois Amigos,” the
pífano (from which the composer derived his adopted surname), played by the band’s woodwind specialist Jorge Continentino, dashes through a series of rapid and difficult passages, backed by percussion and electric guitars, making for a lively musical exchange. The other traditional composition is “Saudade de Manezinho Araújo,” a tribute to the memory of Manuel Pereira de Araújo, a singer and songwriter known as the “king of
embolada,” by another living composer, Téo Azevedo, from the northern part of
Brazil’s Minas Gerais state. It is a tight, cheery little song, also with the melody carried by the
pífano, backed by percussion (triangle, drums, and the cowbell-like
agogô), together with some cowboyish shouts and chanting, also characteristic of northeastern Brazilian music. But neither one of these tunes has the emotional power of Forro in the Dark’s version of “Asa Branca” (White Wing) from its debut album,
Bonfires of São João (2006). The other compositions on
Light a Candle are by the various band members, with a few outside contributions. The songs that stay closest to home are pleasant if innocuous, such as the instrumentals “Lilou” and “Anão de Jardim” (Garden Gnome), both by band guitarist Guilherme Monteiro. “Caipirinha” (after the Brazilian cocktail), written and sung by percussionist Davi Vieira, is unvarying enough to become grating over its three and a half minutes, though it does stress a broad array of rhythmic instruments. Continentino’s “Bandinha” (Little Band), opening the disc, is rapid-fire, with furious playing in the
pífano and drums to support Continentino’s singing, but leaves only a mild impression. “Baião Embolado” (the
baião is a rhythm used in the Brazilian northeast, including in
forró), by three of the band members plus former member Gilmar Gomes, has a classically northeastern-sounding verse section (although my Portuguese is suspect, I think there is a bit about preferring
farofa, the toasted manioc flour used as a condiment in Brazilian dishes, to caviar) and vocals but a bland and predictable refrain. “Lampião Chegou” (Lampião Has Arrived; Lampião was a legendary northeastern bandit) is stirring yet is merely a reprise of the song “Lampião No Céu” (Lampião in the Sky) from the debut record. As nouveau-
forró, Forro in the Dark has always had a nontraditional lineup, in that one of the three basic instruments of
forró, the accordion (along with the triangle and the
zabumba bass drum), is missing. Whereas on
Bonfires of São João only one David Byrne song seemed out of place, on the new record, the band makes clear its aim to venture well beyond
forró for inspiration. Vieira’s “Perro Loco,” with lyrics in Spanish, is a zippy offering, with handclaps and bass guitar as its motoric element and luscious garnish provided by Continentino’s
baritone sax. “Silence Is Golden,” which was co-written by
Brazilian Girls (see the 2008 music survey) lead singer Sabina Sciubba and is sung breathily by her in English, sounds like a
Brazilian Girls song, which is fine by me. It has an amusing lyric, a tale of romance and intrigue whose spell is shattered when an erstwhile mysterious and mute stranger opens his mouth and reveals himself to be a commonplace
Midwesterner. The other three songs with English lyrics are a series of bad mistakes. For “Just Like Every Other Night,” the final selection on the disc, bandleader and percussionist Mauro Refosco invited in Jesse Harris, who has led the Ferdinandos and worked with Norah Jones, as co-writer and lead singer. The song has a decent enough shimmery bass line, accentuating the notion of a resounding hangover, but the words are self-pitying and prosaic, and Harris’s voice sounds neutered. Far worse are “Nonsensical” by Vieira and “Better than You” by
Monteiro. The former, which first appeared on an EP,
Dia de Roda (2008), is a lumbering effort with a message of intolerance that says, in effect, if you do not like Bob Marley and reggae, then stay clear of me. The latter has an execrable lyric of smug superiority (or at least aspirational superiority), with none of tongue-in-cheek humor that makes the similar-themed “Extra Savoir-Faire” (1994) by They Might Be Giants so enjoyable. One can always skip these two tracks, which are consecutive on the CD, but they drag down an otherwise passably enjoyable record like a lead sinker.
B-/C+
BEBEL GILBERTO, All in One—Thanks to her starry lineage and her talent, Bebel Gilberto can get away with what other performers cannot. She can bathe in nostalgia for the golden age of bossa nova, which was already exhausted by the time she was born (in
New York City, incidentally) in 1966, because her father is João Gilberto, acknowledged as the patriarch of the movement. She can take fluff material and turn it into the most
delectable and long-lasting cotton-candy because she has a voice that could melt an iceberg or make a hungry tiger lie down and purr, as warm and smooth and sensual as it is. On
All in One, her third full-length release since the
breakthrough of
Tanto Tempo (2000), bossa nova still reigns, although Gilberto exercises her chops on other styles as well. She pays direct homage to her now reclusive father by covering his “Bim Bom,” sometimes credited as the first bossa nova song, written by the elder Gilberto around 1956. This gentle, harmonically suave number is given the sparest arrangement on the record, just a piano and a touch of drums and cymbals. The piano is played by Daniel Jobim, grandson of another bossa nova legend, Antônio Carlos Jobim; Daniel Jobim also harmonizes on vocals. Another longing look back to the glamour of an earlier era is “Chica Chica Boom Chic,” the Carmen Miranda number written for
That Night in Rio (1941) by Harry Warren, with lyrics by Mack Gordon. Gilberto admitted in an interview with
Billboard having idolized Miranda. Her version is a
suitably lighthearted and sexy romp, and she gets expert support from the well-known percussionist Carlinhos Brown, Carlos Darci on trombone, and
Brazilian Girls’ Didi Gutman on piano. More radical is her reworking of Bob Marley’s “Sun Is Shining” (1971): loosely translating the lyric into
Portuguese and adding her own flourishes, she turns it into a gauzy electronic dreamscape the late reggae master would not recognize (and might not appreciate), but no matter; it sounds great. Similar treatment, if less drastic a transformation (for one thing, this is sung entirely in English), is doled out to the much-covered “The Real Thing” (1977), written for Sérgio Mendes by Stevie Wonder—not quite deracinated from its soul-funk home ground, still, it is given a plush cushion of vibraphone and synthesizer and adorned with horns, flutes, and tropical drums absent from the guitar-propelled original. “Nossa Senhora” (Our Lady) follows “Bim Bom” on the record and matches its easygoing bossa nova groove; the prayerful song is
delivered comfortingly by Gilberto to the subtle accompaniment of its co-authors:
Paulo Levita on acoustic guitar and Carlinhos Brown on drums, other percussion, and restrained sound effects. Of the songs the singer herself wrote or co-wrote, comprising half the record’s twelve tracks, the most appealing is the solemn, atmospheric “Secret (Segredo),” written with pianist Thomas Bartlett, who supplied its haunting keyboard chord progression. “Forever” (English title but lyrics in
Portuguese) is a soft, simple, brief melody but with enough harmonic complexity to be affecting. “Ela (On My Way),” written with Brown, has a certain sophistication to its tender beauty as well. Elsewhere, Gilberto’s songwriting collaborations fall victim to triteness, rendering the pieces romantic baubles, in particular the opening “Canção de Amor” (Love Song) and the closing “Port Antonio” (named for the
Jamaican city in which it and some of the other tracks were recorded).
B+
IMOGEN HEAP, Ellipse—The other six-foot English songstress in the current survey, Imogen Heap is very different in
temperament from
Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine (see above). Subtler and more restrained in her music, she is also trading far less on her sexuality. Heap’s music is almost purely electronic—just a woman, her voice, and her computer/bank of synthesizers. Plus a handful of invited instrumentalists. Her singing is cool and reserved, yet the music manages to avoid sounding chilly or remote. In fact, the opening tune, “First Train Home,” is wonderfully enveloping in its
breathy warmth. In a mark of skillful songwriting, the component parts are devised, structured, and arranged in a way that is so logical and euphonious as to seem obvious—as if the song had always been around, waiting for someone to put it on a recording and claim credit.
Ellipse is also quintessentially English in ways that are hard to describe—a Ruskin-like attentiveness to nature is part of it—and that are distinct from the more universal themes of
Florence and company. The atmospherics of Heap’s music have a cinematic sweep, and so it is no surprise that her skills have been put to work in both movies (
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and television (
The O.C.). All those electronics could weigh down the record, but Heap keeps it lightfooted in pacing and clean in timbres. “Earth” has a snappy, syncopated scatting chorus (presumably all Heap’s voice, multitracked) backing its brisk theme. “Bad Body Double” is a wry comment on body image, a welcome injection of humor into what is otherwise a fairly studied collection of songs. “2-1” (one of a couple of soccer references here) has appealingly dusky undertones, though the song’s climax never musters the intensity it should. The intricate, understated character of the recording sometimes works against it: with little coming across as stirring or riveting (the buildup in “Swoon” is an exception), I found my attention fading at times. The lyrics are printed in the CD booklet but could have used a copy editor’s attention (“taught” where “taut” was intended in “Canvas”; “
breath” instead of “
breathe”).
A-/B+
ROBYN HITCHCOCK & THE VENUS 3, Goodnight Oslo—Hitchcock’s second album with his current band, the Venus 3, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about the performer or prompt a reassessment of his long career, which stretches back to the late 1970s and the group The Soft Boys. As I have said before in these surveys, even on an off day or when “phoning it in,” Hitchcock is a far more gifted entertainer than most. The material on
Goodnight Oslo is hardly inspired or revelatory but manages to be ingratiating all the same. The record’s sonic texture is stripped down, a little country-ish at times, more than a little folky. But there is also an effort, on the opening track, “What You Is,” as well as the two succeeding tracks, “Your Head Here” and “Saturday Groovers,” to reach back to an earlier sound, the sort of sleekly hip, new-wave phantasmagoria that characterized Hitchcock’s early solo material in the 1980s. “What You Is” slinks in sinuously, suggesting that identity is something that can be shed like a snakeskin and that how people present themselves in the here and now is all that counts. “Saturday Groovers” has a singalong quality, its bizarre verses about youth wasting their minds and health notwithstanding. The lyrics generally are more introspective, like an internal monologue, and less whimsical than on the previous release,
Olé! Tarantula (2006). “Hurry for the Sky” has the keening electric chords over strumming accompaniment that evokes “Ghost Riders in the Sky” (though its hurried resolution is all too tidy), while “TLC” also displays Hitchcock’s oddly English take on country music that first appeared on “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” (1984) a quarter-century ago; the song is a bluesy ballad whose title actually refers to a set of pharmaceuticals used as sedatives or antidepressants. “Up to Our Nex,” one of the blander songs on the disc, appeared earlier in the Jonathan Demme movie
Rachel Getting Married (2008). The title tune, one of the strongest compositions, concludes the track list. It has the same retro feel as the initial songs; meantime, its chiming electric guitars resolve from minor mode verse to major in the chorus. It also has more surreal lyrics than the rest of the album: its “travelogue of the offbeat” impressions are a favorite recurring theme of Hitchcock’s songwriting. The Venus 3 consists of Peter Buck of R.E.M. on guitar, Scott McCaughey of Young Fresh Fellows on bass, and Ministry’s Bill Rieflin on drums, with additional contributions from various others, including former Soft Boys and Egyptians bandmate Morris Windsor on backing vocals.
A/A-
ÉTIENNE JAUMET, Night Music—Like Thomas Watkiss (see below), Étienne Jaumet makes electronica for eggheads, music that art
gallery directors can put on for the black-turtleneck set. Unlike Watkiss, Jaumet is less interested in replicating
industrial sounds and more oriented toward a lighter minimalism. He uses throwback synthesizers, Moogs and cheap electronics, all in service of a futurism that pays homage to the 1970s. The robotic synth pattern and electronic flourishes on “Mental Vortex,” in particular, recall Kraftwerk at its creative peak. Jaumet brought in Carl Craig, a
Detroit techno specialist, to do the mixing, though I wonder why an electronica whiz could not or would not handle those chores himself. Nearly half the record is consumed by the twenty-minute-plus opening track, “For Falling Asleep,” whose somnolence-inducing power comes not from its sheer length but from its diminution over time, from a hive of mental activity at the start to serenely level electroencephalograph readings by the close. Much of the piece is taken up with a synthesizer arpeggio, sequenced and looped ad infinitum, over a medium-pitch drone, that fluctuates in terms of dynamics and the “blitter” of its electronic filtering. It puts me in mind of the
Midnight Express theme from 1978. But instead of the melody from that tune, substitute a bit of looped cymbals, a doleful saxophone riff, and at one point a woman’s voice—credited to 1960s/1970s French folk singer Emmanuelle Parrenin—not so much singing as ululating, sounding choked up, jittery, and frantic. About two-thirds of the way into the piece, the kinetic cycling of the synthesizer breaks off abruptly, replaced by long tones, with that same sax pattern above them, gradually subsiding. Toward the close, with an electronic hum still menacing in the background, rising tidally at times to swallow the other sounds and then ebbing, there is some quiet harp playing, again by Parrenin. The folk singer reappears on the doomy-sounding, droning piece “Through the Strata,” playing the hurdy gurdy in a way that sounds Middle Eastern/modal and warbling softly in the same fragile, desperate state as on “For Falling Asleep.” “Entropy” is a four-and-three-quarters-minutes study in tedium, setting an unrelenting five-note pattern of B-C-sharp-E-B-C-sharp to a danceable drumbeat. “At the Crack of Dawn,” the final composition, brings back the dire-sounding saxophone over low sustained synth tones and high-pitched, videogame-style zapping noises. It is closely akin to the music of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, evoking imagery of some creature evolving in time-lapse cinematography from the primordial slime.
A-
NATALIA LAFOURCADE, Hu Hu Hu—Three years out from the dissolution of her band,
Natalia y la Forquetina,
Natalia Lafourcade, all of twenty-five years old, resumed recording as a singer-songwriter. I had regrets about this change in direction; I felt that
Natalia y la Forquetina’s one record,
Casa (2005), was, seemingly out of nowhere, one of the decade’s best. The new disc does not rock the way that one did. Instead, it is a decidedly softer and more personal artistic statement. It took me several listenings to warm to
Hu Hu Hu, notwithstanding my having seen Lafourcade perform a number of the selections live, after which most of my reservations dissipated. For the first time, Lafourcade, who started off as a singer-songwriter modeling herself on Gloria Trevi, sings several songs in English, a language she is only starting to get a handle on. Given these limitations, the lyrics in English are like something from a badly translated Eastern European fairy tale,
delivered tentatively in a heavy accent. The exception is “Let’s Get Out,” in which she
wisely keeps the words basic. (But that leaves just two songs out of thirteen as problematic.) Singing in Spanish, of course, she is far more in her element. Here, the words convey many child’s-eye observations, fresh and wondrous, that are tempered by a sly knowingness that comes with greater experience of the world. Behind the innocence and the whimsy, she can offer very adult perspectives on the subject of romance. Likewise, in the music itself, melodies presented with nursery-rhyme simplicity eventually betray far more sophistication, and it is precisely here that Lafourcade’s prodigious songwriting talents shine. Not to say that she is incapable of simplicity for its own sake: the wounded feelings and quietly accusatory tone of “No Viniste” (You Did Not Show Up) work off a fundamental and unchanging dotted-note rhythmic pattern, just a woman and her melodica, with minimal embroidering by other instruments (on this track, as on several others, Lafourcade plays all the instruments). “Un Lugar para Renacer” (
A Place for Rebirth) is an exquisite example of Lafourcade in singer-songwriter mode, the music stripped down and restrained but with a sublime beauty. “Azul” (Blue) is the most Regina Spektor-ish (see below) track, playful yet complex, with quiet sections alternating with more orchestrated outbursts, as a girl works through a series of fears, from silly, childish ones to the more profound sort less readily dispensed with. “Siempre Prisa” (Always in a Hurry) is for the most part unadorned voice and guitar, lamenting a lover’s or former lover’s unthinking haste, in a rustic folk style that could pass for cowboy-Western. Toward the end, the song develops subsidiary themes using electric keyboards that take on a life of their own. “Let’s Get Out” plays off a simple melody to weave a dreamy, dense fabric of chiming guitars and glockenspiel or xylophone, bouncy bass, clip-clop percussion, and humming chorus that is upbeat and thoroughly engaging. On the title track, Lafourcade trades off verses and duets with
Julieta Venegas (she also collaborates with another compatriot and contemporary, Juan Son, on the sound environment of the closing song, “Look Outside”) over light electronic effects; the presence of the older and more established singer has to be a boon for Lafourcade’s career and disc sales. I was struck by the orchestrations on the opening track, “Cursis Melodías” (Cheesy Melodies): they have a late-sixties period feel that puts me in mind of Pizzicato Five’s early record
Couples (1987), with the difference that Pizzicato Five was consciously trying to write in the style of Burt Bacharach. Lafourcade brings back the cheery horn charts (for which she recruits session trumpeters, trombonists, tuba and sax players) for “Ella Es Bonita” (She Is Pretty), “Azul,” and “Hora de Compartir” (Hour of
Sharing). She has given us an intricately wrought, multifaceted record of many
delights and few
flaws; even so, I will miss the rocking sound she developed for
Casa. A/A-
BAABA MAAL, Television—How far should a performer migrate from his musical identity in search of a broader audience? Is that even a fair question? The career of Baaba Maal, whose rangy, nasal tenor is probably the second-best-known Senegalese voice after Youssou n’Dour, now spans more than two decades (he is fifty-six years old but looks thirty-five), and from his origins as a singer of fairly traditional material from
Senegal, he has moved steadily toward more intensive interaction with Western performers and producers. Barry Reynolds, who has worked with a range of artists from Joe Cocker to Bette Midler to Grace Jones to Black Uhuru, produced
Television, and his fingerprints are all over the record. He shares songwriting credits on five of its eight songs, and it was he who persuaded Maal to work with
Brazilian Girls lead singer Sabina Sciubba and keyboardist Didi Gutman. Because I like
Brazilian Girls, that is not problematic, except insofar as it makes the disc sound sometimes more like a
Brazilian Girls recording session than what I am used to from Maal. One track, “International,” appeared in a slightly different version (less emphasis on African cities, more of a background role for Maal’s vocals) on
Brazilian Girls’ most recent CD,
New York City (see the 2008 music survey). In its lengthy listing of exotic locales around the world, “International” is as empty of meaning as Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989), yet the polyglot Sciubba has the Euro-cred to carry it off convincingly; besides, the music is simply fun to groove to. Oddly, the song I like least on
Television is the one Maal wrote with Reynolds before encountering
Brazilian Girls, “
Dakar Moon.” For the Francophone Maal, singing in English is a departure. The words are not terrible, but the Spanish-style guitar and
Caribbean accents strike me as hackneyed and denatured; this is the downside of the intermingling of cultures across oceans. The other weakness of
Television is creative laziness. Frequently enough, tunes are reprised on records in slightly different versions, but this record offers three that are
essentially the same: “Tindo,” “Song for Women,” and “Tindo Quando.” The song itself, co-written by Maal and Sciubba, is fine, with chill touches of electronica complementing the mystique of Maal’s incantatory,
griot-trained voice, as he and she take turns voicing a darkly minor-mode theme in Fulani or Wolof and Italian. But, on a short record to begin with, how can a producer justify a quarter of it consisting of rehashes? “Cantaloupe” has a fairly elementary, Western theme composed by Gutman and Reynolds, whistled rather than sung, again, very much in the spirit of
Brazilian Girls. Maal speaks the lyrics, along with Sciubba, but toward the end he begins to embroider the melody with his own improvisatory singing in traditional fashion. The song that sounds the most like the Baaba Maal of old is “Miracle, which has the lilting melody and loping gait so typical of
West African pop; Sciubba sings the basic melody in a French/Italian mix, while Maal uses it as a springboard for his own exploratory vocal flights. The introductory title track is nothing special from a musical standpoint—Maal’s muezzin-like voice again rising above Sciubba’s as she outlines the primary theme about “l’homme dans la télévision” (the man on television)—but it is intriguing that Maal sees TV as a potential progressive force in a country where the medium is still fairly new to many households.
B+
MAJOR LAZER, Guns Don’t Kill People … Lazers Do—Over the past few years, I have developed a gradual—and belated—curiosity about
Jamaican music. Dancehall is a genre I had come into contact with via my interest in Sidestepper, from
Colombia. Jon Pareles of
The New York Times liked the Major Lazer record, so I gave it a spin. “Major Lazer” is as much a cartoon character as the four guys supposed to constitute Gorillaz. Behind the music are two white disc jockeys, Diplo (a.k.a. Thomas Wesley Pentz) and Switch (Dave Taylor), forming a
Philadelphia-London axis. They mixed a lineup of singers and toasters on thirteen tracks, mostly produced at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong studios in
Kingston, Jamaica. There is as a result plenty of variety on what is a very unbalanced record: the first six tracks are strong and a pleasure for the most part, while the second half offers little. The first song is called “I’ll Make Ya” on the version of the CD that I have; elsewhere, it is called “Hold the Line” and was released as the first single. Featuring the voices of Santigold and reggae chanter Mr. Lexx, it samples a horse’s clip-clop and neighing, as well as various telephone rings and signals, birdcalls, and, according to Wikipedia, a sample from an old Commodore Amiga game, Mr. Wobbly vs. the Space Mutants. Santigold’s vocal shortcomings were a real weakness on her debut solo CD last year (see Santogold in the 2008 survey), but she fits right into “I’ll Make Ya”/“Hold the Line” because her voice is needed simply for simple monotone phrases, while Mr. Lexx, also monotone, promises, “I’ll make ya vibrate like a Nokia.” This counts as wit and subtlety on an album that features raunch and crude sexual boasting, most objectionably in “What U Like,” which comes close to advocating sexual violence against women. “Can’t Stop” slows to a soul-warmingly relaxed reggae pace, but with a booming bass undercurrent; it showcases the vocals of Jovi Rockwell, an attractive and rising young
Kingston singer and “rebel goddess,” and the grainy singing of
Mr. Vegas (Clifford Smith). The “Lazer Theme,” performed by Future Trouble (a.k.a. Warren Gladstone Williams), has a theme that is suitably military in rhythm and lyrics, with samples of videogame sound effects and, according to Diplo, a loop lifted from the rock band Black Flag. The following track, “Anything Goes,” steeped in tales of guns and rebellion, narrated in a breathless, hectoring voice by Turbulence (Sheldon Campbell), generates action film soundtrack tension and intrigue through snatches of massed strings bowing in a minor key. Both these songs are well matched to a cartoon character who is depicted in a red beret and sunglasses, with a machine gun for a right arm. For “Cash Flow,” sung capably by Jah Dan (or Jahdan Blakkamoore), the mood returns to the easygoing flow of “Can’t Stop,” with the addition of a reggae horn section, yielding the smoothest and most satisfying selection on the disc. Those are the decent tracks. Of the slim pickings from the remainder of the record, the best is “Keep It Goin’ Louder,” a rousing dance number in which the heavily Auto-Tuned vocals of Ricky Blaze wrap like a barber’s pole around those of the identical twin duo known as Nina Sky (“I’ve got the girls in the truck ‘bout six chicks deep”). “Mary Jane” is a clownish number with lyrics that are by turns amusing and simple-minded, most memorable for one “Mr. Evil” (complete with his own Mini-Me) rhyming “you make my fly like Air
Jamaica” with “you make me sing like Anita Baker.” “Bruk Out” sticks in the mind mainly for its annoyingly insistent sampling of one line from Ms. Thing, who also makes an appearance in “When You Hear the Bassline,” while the toasting of the dancehall group T.O.K. relates a sordid yarn that begins with “I met Jill, she was a stripper; I told her I was Jack the Ripper.” The loathsome “What U Like” centered on the crude, mechanistic and aggressive rapping of Einstein (Jermaine Shaw), supposedly includes a contribution from Amanda Blank (
Amanda Mallory), but it is barely perceptible, and why any woman would want to be associated with this filth is beyond me. “Pon de Floor,” intended as another single, has a rat-a-tat snare drum beat but is let down by a lame little singsong vocal by Vybz Kartel (
Adidja Azim Palmer). “Baby” is not much of a “song,” lasting less than eighty seconds, memorable only for the Auto-Tune crying baby, which is basically the entire theme, and for prize lines from Prince Zimboo like “just couple of months ago you was in my testicles, now you are screaming and walking—create spectacle” and “I love all woman’s breast milk.” I laughed, but … ick!
B
METRIC, Fantasies—Following a four-year absence from recording, one of
Canada’s most popular
indie rock acts is back and cooking, much as it did on
Live It Out (2005). Despite the new album’s title, Metric maintains a jaded attitude toward fantasies throughout. At least, that is my takeaway; Emily Haines’s lyrics, confessional and navel-gazing, strive toward a significance that exceeds their grasp. When she asks, in “Gimme Sympathy,” “Who would you rather be/the Beatles or the
Rolling Stones,” perhaps that line is freighted with personal meaning, but to the rest of us, it hardly ranks as one of life’s great questions. The words to “Stadium Love” roam across territory explored by Pat Benatar in “Love Is a
Battlefield” (1983) decades ago, and, although Metric’s version may be more creative in its choice of metaphors, Benatar’s was actually the more affecting song. At times, the lyrics are wry and clever (the printed words for “Gold Guns Girls” tactfully omit the second part of the opening statement: “All the gold and the guns in the world/couldn’t get you off’); elsewhere, they are weighed down by excessive literalness. Still, treating rock lyrics too seriously is a fool’s errand; the music is still terrific, composed by Haines’s songwriting partner, Juilliard-trained (on trumpet!) guitarist Jimmy Shaw. In my music survey, full of eclectic and sometimes obscure choices, Metric is one of the most straightforward rock acts, with a range that extends only from dark and introspective midtempo numbers like “Twilight Galaxy,” “Collect Call,” and “Blindness” to power pop (“Help I’m Alive,” “Satellite Mind,” “Gold Guns Girls,” “Front Row,” “Stadium Love”). One could
wish for more daring and cutting-edge experimentation, but within the bounds of convention that Metric sets up, it regularly hits the bull’s eye.
Fantasies is more consistent than was
Live It Out: it does not have the lulls of its predecessor, though it also
never gets quite as rousing and urgent as “
Monster Hospital” and “Poster of a Girl” from that CD. Even in songs where the verse section seems headed down a blind alley, the chorus always manages to sweep the listener up into a great welling of sound. There are a few nice details along the way: the machine-gun-like rhythms of the bass and guitars in “Gold Guns Girls”; the
shoegaze-style chiming and echoing of the strings in “Gimme Sympathy”; the modal harmonies that add a bit of exoticism to the verse of “Front Row,” tempering its bombast. “Collect Call,” in its dreamy and revelatory nature, comes closest to the music of the group’s friends and compatriots in the
Montreal band Stars (see the 2007 music survey). Haines has a great voice for rock, thick-textured but smart and expressive, conveying the gamut of emotions from ringing protest to vulnerability. Metric is a good band that could yet have the makings of a great one.
A/A-
MICACHU, Jewellery—A lot of critics really liked this debut record from young English songwriter Mica Levi, performing alias Micachu, done partly with the collaboration of her backup band, the Shapes (Raisa Khan on synthesizers and keyboards; Marc Pell on drums and percussion). In fact, it caused consternation in the British music press when Micachu and the Shapes failed to be nominated for the 2009 Mercury Prize. Micachu has an impressive pedigree: the daughter of musicians, she herself studied classical composition at
Guildhall School of Music. Not a great deal of that training is evident on
Jewellery, however, even though the songs are reportedly based on her music writing at school. Micachu is like a highly literate little modern-day punk. Her songs are short and punchy, with aggressive but fairly regular beats and melodies that sometimes seem to pride themselves on their antimelodic nature. Her voice is not bad, but I cannot help wondering if her bluff East Ender accent is an affectation, to slum with the working classes. So is Micachu a genuine innovator, or is she “mavericky” in the Sarah Palin sense? There are certainly germs of interesting ideas on
Jewellery, but they are not developed very far; my takeaway is that here we have a performer with some potential whose sensibilities are still largely unformed. The record revels in its rawness, and that unrefined energy is what fans respond to. The electronics whiz Matthew Herbert, himself classically trained (his Big Band’s CD was reviewed as part of the 2008 survey), produced the record, layering sludgy synths and crisp electronic effects between the guitars and the percussion. There is real poetry in the verse of “Curly Teeth” (as with a number of songs, there is no true chorus here), describing a queen-bee type: “Yeh she had straight eyes and curly teeth; when she smiled at me I got a nose bleed/ She spat me out, said what’s your business with me, but all I wanted to be was in her company/ She had a room with no space to compete. When I fell at her feet she clapped in time to the beat.” As for the inspired bits, the brief “Sweetheart” takes a descending synth pattern and puts it through a sonic blender, shaking up both rhythm and accompaniment, ending in an unearthly bleat. “Golden Phone” has a fairly basic theme (as do many of the songs) but a nice, compact arrangement. The guitar part in “Just in Case” has a quasi-Brazilian sheen, like a chorus of ukulele-like
cavaquinhos over rattling percussion; then, when Micachu dissects the song’s innards, well, somewhere Tom Zé must be smiling. The other songs flit by, registering no more than phantom traces. The opening of “Calculator” sounds too much like the intro to “Tequila” (1958). “Wrong” ends with someone (Matthew Herbert?) shouting, “That’s a keeper!” “Turn Me Well” features the accompaniment of a vacuum cleaner. Annoyingly, Herbert has incorporated twenty minutes of silence into the final track, “Guts,” between the song proper and a brief coda, which is apparently called “Hardcore,” although it is not on the track list, simply listed in the musician credits in the booklet. Not even ninety seconds long, it is hardly worth the wait.
B
NISENNENMONDAI, Destination Tokyo—Call it noise rock, or no wave,
Destination Tokyo garnered a lot of critical attention. Nisennenmondai, which is Japanese for “Y2K bug,” a prevalent issue at the time of the band’s formation, is an all-female trio of Masako Takada on guitar, Yuri Zaikawa on bass, and drummer Sayaki Himeno. The intention on the new record was to make music that was not only clean and minimalist in sound, harkening back to Kraftwerk and similar European experimentation, but also something fans could bop along to, as evidenced by titles like “Disco” and “Mirrorball.” In fact, the music is not particularly danceable, save for the last track, unless one likes to do so in robotic fashion. To appreciate Nisennenmondai requires tolerance for the highly repetitive nature of its music—a little too repetitive for my tastes. The compositions are like a theme and variations except that there is no formal theme, just a rhythmic pattern of strumming, chords, and drumbeats, and the variations are so slight and spaced apart as to demand the sort of concentration that the casual listener may not care to give. The first of the album’s five pieces, “Souzousuru Neji,” is the longest at thirteen minutes and the most unrelentingly unvarying. It begins (following as an intro the only words uttered on the disc, “Destination Tokyo”) with a monontone drill-like figuration in the bass guitar that continues throughout, becoming something between an ostinato and a drone. Above it, the guitarist tries out some squeaky notes, eventually settling into a baleful-sounding six-note pattern that continues to the end, but with modest guitar riffing tracked alongside it, together with some bass pedal action. “Mirrorball” starts off setting a straight sixteenth-note pattern against a modified
clave rhythm. Eventually, as that concept begins to grow tedious, the
clave segment drops away and the sixteenth notes develop gaps, as the guitarist starts to solo in a range that cautiously expands away from the basic pattern. Yet, it is the rhythmic motif that continues to be miked loudest, as if the guitar variations were merely incidental. “Miraabouru” is a very brief, cartoonish vocalization of the rhythmc pattern from “Mirrorball” (which follows it), in which the women break down into laughter twice; the second time it happens, the track ends with the sound of a tape speeding up. “Disco” and the title track are the most interesting because there is more going on within them. “Disco” starts out in a five-note rut that seems calculated to stultify the audience, but as the song progresses, Takada gives herself gradually more improvisational rein, and eventually the tune modulates and shifts its rhythmic stress in intriguing ways without abandoning the five-note motif underneath. “Destination Tokyo” begins and ends with sounds of a jet streaking by, as in the Beatles' “Back in the U.S.S.R.” (1968). Although it, too, springs from the gate as mind-numbingly repetitive, it moves the furthest away from the noise rock idiom, playing with a whole menu of pleasing thematic ideas (like a bonbon following a spartan repast) above the quarter-note-and-two-eighth-notes rhythm that is its basis.
A-/B+
ONEIDA, Rated O—The experimental
Rated O spans three discs, but, as sprawling as it is, there is somewhat less to it than the triple-CD format would seem to promise. For one thing, in sheer quantity there really is not all that much music here: each disc runs less than forty minutes, for a total of barely more than 110.
Oneida’s obsessive reiteration of thematic elements has its calculated purpose, as subtle gradations in the layering of background sounds keep the observant listener tuned in. Even so, I came away with the impression at times of a band with limited ideas striving to fill up a great deal of space. The first and third discs are free-form and mostly instrumental; the second disc contains more conventionally structured and shorter songs, all of which have lyrics of some kind. Disc A kicks off sounding like a drum and bass session, with “Brownout in
Lagos” and “What’s Up, Jackal?” rattling speakers with unvarying rhythm and plenty of reverberation. “Brownout in
Lagos” has a guest vocalist, Dod-Ali Ziai, hoarsely barking lyrics in an unfamiliar tongue (maybe English fuzzed and garbled beyong recognition?) over the heavy beat; “What’s Up, Jackal?” also has buzzy, indeterminate lyrics, voiced by one of the band members. The wittily named “10:30 at the Oasis,” which has nothing else in common with the Maria Muldaur 1974 hit “Midnight at the Oasis,” stretches across twelve and a half minutes, starting with a quivering keyboard pattern and switching emphasis to a deep, airy bass guitar figuration like something the
Police would have used (as in “Message in a Bottle” from 1979); halfway through the piece, this drops out in favor of a low-key electronic murmur like a chorus of frogs, with a bit of soft chanting on top. In “The Story of O,” named for the
Pauline Réage tale but also self-referential by the band, nothing much happens for nearly eight minutes, while “The Human Factor” is marred by bloodcurdling death-metal screams that pass for singing, starting up past the five-minute mark. Disc B’s songs have a Sonic Youth-like grunginess, although the vocals will remind few of
Thurston Moore. Since I was
never much of a Sonic Youth fan, this comes as no recommendation. I do, however, like the grimy-sounding, Frankensteinian bass accompaniment that dominates “It Was a Wall.” Vocals are sung, or shouted, by Zach Lehrhoff of the ex-Models, a band that a couple of members of
Oneida (drummer Kid Millions and guitarist Shahin Motia) have played in. That is also the only song on the disc without a long instrumental lead-in. “I Will Haunt You” and “Ghost in the Room” go impressively full throttle on the guitars, but both these and the song between them, “The Life You Preferred,” have sung themes that amount to little more than monotones. The vaguely mournful-sounding wisp of a melody in “Saturday,” over guttural drones in the guitars, has an appealingly mystic air. The final disc consists largely of two long-form compositions, with voices almost entirely absent. “O” is an expansive, unhurried dialogue between guitar and sitar, the latter played by special guest Gian Carlo Feleppa, over declamatory drumming. The intricate and gossamer sitar line plays nicely off the blunter, ringing guitars, making this thirteen-minute voyage the album’s showcase piece. The brief track that follows, “End of Time,” will work over the woofer on your speakers with its earthy rumble beneath tinkly percussion and a short-short-long pulse pitched high. The twenty-minute-plus “Folk Wisdom” starts off promisingly but simply runs too long, with too little variation (organist Bobby Matador alternating the same two notes ad nauseam), in particular after the first eleven minutes, when the top instruments largely drop out, leaving the rhythm section to putter away, with reverb and harmonics floating above, keeping the pot boiling for another ten minutes to give the disc a respectable length.
B+/B
PASSION PIT, Manners—March of the Falsettos, Part 2009! I picked up
Manners on the strength of the single “Sleepyhead” (recently appearing in television ads for the Palm Pixi), which I first heard on the sampler compilation
Pop Montréal ’08—see the 2008 music survey. I still get a kick out of the gloriously shrill, goofy “Sleepyhead,” which is akin to a mashup of
Alvin and the Chipmunks and REO Speedwagon, sprinkling pixie dust into bleary eyes in its wake. But the rest of the disc is a letdown. There are a small number of tracks that hit their stride with a rhythmic verve that is potentially infectious. “Little Secrets” is enjoyable enough to be a blissful guilty pleasure, and the addition of
Staten Island’s P.S. 22 Chorus, limited though the sampling may be, enhances the state of euphoria. Similarly, “The Reeling” has a catchy groove in its refrain, heavy with drums and speaker-rattling synthesizers, even if the verse portion amounts to little. In contrast, “Folds in Your Hands” sways appealingly on a gentle syncopation in its verse, but when it comes to the chorus, the song approaches stasis. (It is hysterical to hear lead singer
Michael Angelakos sing in his high-pitched voice, “I will crush, I will maul/I will burn until I get to you.” You and what army, Michael?) The rest of the album can be consigned to the pile marked as sonic glop, unfortunately.
Boston-based Passion Pit’s sound is electric-keyboard-heavy; four of the five group members—even the bassist, Jeff Apruzzese, is outfitted with synth pedals —play synthesizers, and this tends to overwhelm guitars and anything else other than the percussion of Nate Donmoyer. The contributions of some interesting people—members of the bands Antibalas (see the 2007 music survey) and Les Savy Fav—are essentially lost in the muddle. On “Moth’s Wings,”
Michael Angelakos takes his voice down a register for a change and comes to resemble the vocal mannerisms of Tunde Adebimpe. Like Adebimpe’s band, TV on the Radio, Passion Pit is wordy, but the
Boston group’s lyrics are dopier. There is certainly a lot of bad poetry in the current year’s music survey (viz. Au Revoir Simone; see above); Passion Pit’s lyrics are as narcissistic as your average twenty-something’s verse, but, even accounting for that, they read like confused juvenilia, groping for an adequate means of expression and failing. There is a certain amount of religious imagery (“like an Orthodox saint”), but it is not a major feature of the album. The printed lyrics in the CD booklet have their share of typos, the worst of which is titling the eighth song “To Kingdome Come.” Get with the program, people! The Kingdome was blown to kingdom come in 2000, in
Seattle. The wise listener should get hold of “Sleepyhead” as a single and leave the rest behind.
B-
PETER BJORN AND JOHN, Living Thing—It is understandable that the Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John did not want to feel boxed in by the success of their hit “Young Folks,” from their marvelous 2006 album
Writer’s Block. But the group’s mediocre all-but-follow-up (there was an instrumental album called
Seaside Rock in 2008),
Living Thing, does not move PB&J in an encouraging direction. The threesome were aiming for songs that are darker and more cynical in outlook than those on
Writer’s Block as well as a more percussive sound, replete with finger snapping and handclaps. The title track pays respects to the Electric Light Orchestra’s “Livin’ Thing” (1976) but borrows no more from that song than the words of its refrain. True to the band’s intentions, the guitar part is more a rhythmic than a melodic element, and the drummer, John Eriksson, strikes up a
vigorous backbeat. But the sung refrain is tedious enough—Beach Boys-type falsetto in the recapitulation notwithstanding—to send me back to E.L.O.’s
A New World Record for relief. The wittiest song lyrics belong to “Blue Period Picasso,” about a lovesick artwork longing for a (female) art thief to take it off the wall and home with her. In strict musical terms, though, it does little with its theme other than basic modulation, settling on an all too easy resolution in the chorus. The slow-footed melody of the following song, “4 Out of 5,” is doo-wop derivative. Some of the tunes rise to the distinction of being “not bad,” including “It Don’t Move Me,” with its low, accentuated piano chords; “Nothing to Worry About,” whose nyeah-nyeah singsong refrain is augmented by a girls’ chorus; and “Lay It Down,” which pairs a bouncy theme with dopey lyrics that are profane for the sake of profanity, I guess. “Stay This Way,” a ballad with a rolling drumbeat, has a thematic sophistication that is absent from much of the disc. But the charm and catchiness that made
Writer’s Block sparkle are nowhere to be found. Instead, we are treated to mind-numbingly simplistic melodies like those in “The Feeling,” “I’m Losing My Mind,” “I Want You,” and “Just the Past,” where the rising and descending scales that purport to constitute a theme might as well have been sketched out by a ten-year-old with a primitive
MIDI interface. Such elemental chord patterns work well enough for punk bands; PB&J is anything but that. It does not help matters that Peter Morén is a scratchy-voiced singer; he mostly compensates by avoiding sustained notes that point up his shortcomings.
B-/C+
PHOENIX, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix—The fourth studio release from
Phoenix,
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix attracted a widespread following and made a surprising number of critics’ best-of lists. I say surprising because the album really is not much good, notwithstanding the strength of the single “1901,” which will be familiar to most people for having been used in a Cadillac commercial in the
United States. (
Phoenix had a much more successful year than General Motors.)
Phoenix hails from
Versailles, as do Air (see above) and Daft Punk; in fact, the group got its start backing Air on a remix of a song from its debut
Moon Safari in the late 1990s. Many bands run into problems attempting to write in English when it is not their native language, but
Phoenix’s lyrics are uniquely baffling: not so much trite as appearing to have been assembled by a random sentence generator. That might sound odd coming from a critic who loves the group Yes, but the difference is that the nonsensical lyrics of Yes were chosen for their euphony as much as anything and achieved a kind of poetic beauty in their strangely evocative imagery. The French band’s words seem to be striving for some deeper meaning and failing miserably. In that regard, the best songs on
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix are the two parts of “Love Like a Sunset” since the first is an instrumental and the second has just a few lines of verse. In fact, leaving aside literary considerations, “Love Like a Sunset Part I” is a lovely composition, a buzzing, tinkling jewel of electronica that ascends to a preliminary climax, then pulls back briefly before the guitars resume the theme and raise the intensity level steadily, driving the piece to a powerful conclusion with a musical logic worthy of Air at its best. Part II is little more than a two-minute coda. “1901” is worthwhile primarily for its catchy and echoey refrain; that would stick with the listener even without the help of some hip ad designer working on behalf of GM. The verse portion of the song has a throwaway quality that simply makes one impatient to get back to the chorus. And that is the problem with most of this record. The songs that precede and succeed “1901” are so-so and not bad, respectively. “Lisztomania,” the album’s starter, is at least light and snappy, even if it is hard to see what the title has to do with the rest of the lyrics. It starts with an oscillation of a fifth interval in the guitar, which could have served as a framing device but instead seems to trap the melody in an overly schematic and restricted space. (In fact, the infectious refrain of “1901” is a power-chord embellishment of a similar but slightly more complex intervalic repetition.) “Fences” holds together nicely as a medium-tempo composition that, unlike others on this disc, successfully integrates verse and chorus and that I might characterize as reflective if I could make heads or tails of the lyrics. Following the two “Love Like a Sunset”s, the five songs that make up the second half of the record amount to a waste of aluminum and electric power resources, not to mention the listener’s time (and money). Notably, “Girlfriend” and the refrain of “Lasso” are stuck in the identical major-fifth broken chord interval as “Lisztomania,” and even “Countdown” and “Armistice” carry the faint imprint of the same pattern. How about trying something different, guys?
B/B-
A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS, Exploding Head—Noise rock with all the subtlety of the Red Army overrunning
Poland,
A Place to
Bury Strangers takes its place alongside Sunn O))) and Boris in the ranks of bands determined to make your eardrums bleed. Dubbed “the loudest band in
New York,”
A Place to
Bury Strangers—one of the dumber band names of recent times—models itself after My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Kids are taught early in art class that mixing all the colors together yields a muddy brown mess; an analogous principle applies to sound. All that feedback, screeching white noise, humming amps, booming drumbeats—it certainly wipes out comprehension of the lyrics. Moreover,
A Place to Bury Strangers is little more than a one-trick pony: nearly all its antediluvian themes, which are taken through simple repetition rather than development, are resolved the same way. Since the group evinces no compositional genius, then, the fascination is limited to sonic pyrotechnics. The band’s threesome—Oliver Ackermann on guitar and vocals; Jono MOFO (Jonathan Smith) on bass; Jay Space on drums—are maestros of rattling reverb and crunching chords, which undeniably has visceral appeal, yet it is an elaborate and flashy shell housing a void. “Lost Feeling” barely has a melody of any sort; just a several-note phrase that goes nowhere, garbed in clanging guitars and sound effects, and “Deadbeat” adds to this recipe only an agile bass line. The band speeds through both the opener, “It Is Nothing,” and “I Lived My Life to Stand in the Shadow of Your Heart” (huh?), the final song, as if it cannot wait to get to the end; my pulse would race if I felt there were anything at stake in listening. The band would probably not appreciate it being pointed out that a subsidiary theme in “Everything Always Goes Wrong” sounds like the verse portion of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time” (1984), while the “chorus” of “Smile When You Smile” bears a resemblance to that of “Tin Birds” by Blank Dogs (see above). I do not dislike everything on
Exploding Head. “Keep Slipping Away,” although saddled with a fairly obvious and repetitious theme, at least has a tunefully appealing guitar harmony underpinning it, as well as a slower section in the middle for variety’s sake. “Ego Death” has a gruesome, pounding majesty and builds to a satisfying if hardly daring climax. But I will not be clamoring for the
next A Place to Bury Strangers release.
B/B-
QUIERO CLUB, Nueva America—I first caught wind of this group, from
Monterrey, Mexico—home as well to Kinky,
Plastilina Mosh (see the 2008 music survey), and Ely Guerra—upon hearing its Spanish-language Cheap Trick cover, “Yo Quiero que Me Quieras” (I Want You to Want Me, from 1977), which is not on the new disc. What is in the water of
Monterrey to produce so many rock-oriented acts these days, I am not sure. Relative proximity to the
U.S. border has something to do with it, but Ciudad Juárez and
Tijuana are both larger and directly across the boundary, and neither one has a similar cluster. Although Quiero Club does not sound much like compatriots Café Tacuba, the two bands share a hankering for retro pop styles; a lot of the tunes would, making allowances for fifty years of advances in electronics technology, fit comfortably in the era of bobby-soxers and poodle skirts. Unlike Kinky, Quiero Club shows little interest in incorporating the
banda sounds of its native region into its music. Moderate dance tempos are the norm, and lyrics are sung in either English or Spanish. Band members trade off lead vocals: the two females are not bad, or at least one of them is decent and the other so-so (with no credits on the CD jacket, it is impossible to tell when Priscilla González is singing and when it is Marcela Viejo instead), though Gustavo Mauricio’s elfin tenor, similar to that of
Colin Meloy of the Decembrists (see above), is not to my liking. Jorge González of the
Chilean band Los Prisioneros is the featured vocalist, in duet with one of the women, on the derivative-sounding “Minutos de Aire.”
Nueva America starts off well enough with “The Flow,” an electronic composition with a burbling bass line whose sense of fatalism stems from its refrain built from a simple descending scale. “Darwin Mustard” drips deliciously with suave coolness. But most of the songs have rudimentary themes that the group then fails to play with in interesting ways. “Fin de Semana” is as teeny-bopping as any, but at least here Quiero Club slows the beat markedly toward the end, then finishes the song speeding up to a furious presto tempo in the countryish-sounding guitar, with whoops and percussion like banging pots, that is a rare bow to
norteño music. “Fifty One” moves briskly, but its new-new wave energy is undermined by a jejune melody; this piece is remixed by fellow Mexicans Disco Ruido as the final track of the CD. “
Breathing is a fairly colorless, slow piece in 3/4 time until it becomes clangorous and echoey toward the end. “Maybe” is genuinely plaintive enough to earn a modicum of distinction as a ballad. More entertainingly, “La Muerte de Ziggy” (The Death of Ziggy) is a robotic whirl of an instrumental, humorous and cartoonishly fun. On “It’s All About Dun-Dun,” the primary theme itself, sung by Mauricio, is unremarkable. But the extended saxophone jam session, augmented by bass, that follows the main body of the song is fantastic, the
baritone and tenor saxes wrapping around each other, wailing and gurgling and sounding grainy by turns. If only the rest of the record lived up to that sequence. I like the CD back cover design, which maps the songs as if they were provinces of some undiscovered Central American country.
B+/B
RADIOHEAD, OK Computer (Collectors Edition)—Capitol/EMI, seeking to maximize revenue from its back catalog, has reissued each of Radiohead’s first three studio albums, with “collectors editions” containing two discs comprising the original record plus a second disc of songs that never before made it onto a record plus live recordings and other rarities. There are also three-CD “special collectors editions” that include a DVD with music videos.
OK Computer was Radiohead’s magnum opus, my Album of the Year for 1997 and, in my estimation, the best rock album put out in the 1990s. There is little more that needs saying about the original disc, so I will concentrate on the second disc, which contains eight tracks appearing nowhere else (like getting half a new Radiohead release, for only twice the price!), plus two remixes, two live recordings, and three songs that were part of a BBC radio session, for a total of fifteen tracks and a little more than an hour’s listening. Fans of the song “Climbing the Walls” will be especially excited to see that, between the two CDs, the song appears in four different versions. Disc 2 is divided into four modules. The first is four B-sides (an antiquated concept in the age of CDs and digital downloads) to the song “
Paranoid Android.” “
Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)” begins with what almost sounds like a false start: a quiet, inward-looking forty-two-second take, just Thom Yorke’s voice and guitar. Then the song restarts, with the full band rocking out in much the way it did on its second album,
The Bends (1995), in ringing descending-scale guitar chords. “A Reminder” seems to reach back even
further, to the spirit of the band’s debut album,
Pablo Honey (1993), beginning with a snippet of the public address system in a French train station before a poignant, chiming theme materializes. “Melatonin” is not much more than an airy fragment, all held tones under
Yorke’s nervous warble, while the melody and harmonics of “
Pearly*” seem too pat and elementary to make a lasting impression. The second module contains the four “Karma Police” B-sides. “Meeting in the Aisle” is an exquisite, shimmery, trembling instrumental number, a guitar chorale from someone’s fuzzily remembered dream. “Lull” is a fairly innocuous song spiked with the tinging of a glockenspiel. There follow two remixes of “Climbing the Walls.” The Zero 7 (see below) remix seems singularly inappropriate, placing an edgy song whose unsettling narrative has to do with insecurity, surveillance, and paranoia in a cool, lounge-y setting. Even so, Zero 7’s version is fascinating, with lush arrangements and peculiar sonorities more reminiscent of the
Brazilian Girls than of Radiohead, particularly toward the end of the song, which introduces a wholly new, louche theme over the Pink Floyd-esque crowd chatter that characterizes parts of
OK Computer (but not in fact “Climbing the Walls”). The Fila
Brazillia remix is a less interesting,
trip-hop treatment, standing out from the original primarily by adding a deep bass groove. The third module offers four B-sides to “No Surprises.”
Yorke intones mainly
indecipherable lyrics about a “city of
the future” in “skies of
California gray” in “
Palo Alto,” spiked by raucous guitar outbursts and reverb and with plenty of white noise bookending the piece; this is what
OK Computer might have been if the band had transplanted itself from Oxford to the Bay Area. “How I Made My Millions,” like the first take of “Polyethylene,” is a dark, introverted chamber piece, just
Yorke’s spindly voice over piano with plenty of echo—akin to something from the nail-biting, navel-gazing
Kid A (2000) or
Amnesiac (2001), the two successor albums to
OK Computer. The live recordings of “Airbag” in
Berlin and even more so of “Lucky” in
Florence hold remarkably closely to the studio versions from
OK Computer. “Airbag” is a little more rough-hewn, but, remarkably, the lyrics are easier to understand in the live setting. For “Lucky,” one can barely hear any crowd noise beyond the stage. The fourth module consists of three songs performed for the BBC Radio One Evening Session, May 28, 1997. “Climbing the Walls” (again!) is presented in a more straightforward and less obscurantist rendition (for once you can actually make out the words) than on the album, with a few zoomy electronic flourishes added at the close. “Exit Music (for a Film)” is also engineered more cleanly than the original, but it strikes me as a little
flat-footed and less affecting at Radio One. Finally, “No Surprises” is taken at a slightly slower tempo than the studio recording, with resonating glockenspiels and those doorbell-sounding staggered chords and lots of air around the phrasings, all but inviting a sing-along.
A+/A
REGINA SPEKTOR, Far—As much as I adore
Regina Spektor, she has
never managed to grab the brass ring in my music survey, even as her fame has spread and her fan base has grown.
Far will not take Album of the Year honors either because it does not sustain the excitement from beginning to end. There are starkly stronger and weaker songs on the new record, and the latter tend to cluster toward the end, as if the singer-songwriter were running out of gas toward the end of a long set. The most enjoyable tracks—“Eet,” “Machine,” and “Dance Anthem of the 80’s”—represent Spektor in top form, while others like “Blue Lips,” “Laughing With,” “Human of the Year,” and “Two Birds” are characteristically ruminative while being songful enough not to seem dry intellectual exercises. Best of all is “Dance Anthem of the 80’s,” which starts off sounding like one of those elementary ditties from Spektor’s
Soviet Kitsch (2004) days but then throws the listener a number of curveballs as it becomes her swingiest and most sophisticated composition to date. The quasi-operatic “Machine” has Spektor singing the chorus in a higher than normal register, while her piano spills out unsettling arpeggios, pausing periodically to pound out some thunderous left-hand chords. The sci-fi lyric, less compelling than the music, ends with a deliberately unconvincing “the future/ it’s here/ it’s bright/ it’s now” that brings the flow to a thudding halt. “Eet” also underachieves from the standpoint of poetry, but the music itself is sweepingly lyrical, alternating between softly probing verses—just voice and piano—and others, nearly as sparely arranged, that are brasher, with a greater sense of motion (the piano bridge section adds little to the tune, though). The opening song, “Calculation,” uses stride piano figurations to forge ahead with a mixture of boldness and whimsy (talk of making a computer out of macaroni; a vision of laying out a pair of beating hearts on a granite countertop) to set the stage for “Eet” and the other tracks. One can take issue with Spektor’s assertion in “Blue Lips” that blue is “the most human color,” but the song is thoughtful and effective, with the questing verse portion floating by on a cloud of keyboard arpeggios augmented by guitar chords and the brooding stop-time chorus embellished by programmed strings. “Laughing With” is thematically related to “Blue Lips”—both concern themselves with faith and man’s relationship with god—but is simpler in structure and arrangements and taken at a more deliberate tempo. Although the song proposes that god can be funny as well as fear-inducing, the last line, switching from “no one’s laughing at god” to “we’re all laughing with god” falls flat—too pat a conclusion for a such an intriguingly speculative song. “Two Birds” is oddly rousing and briskly paced, considering that one of the song’s bird pair has no intention of moving from his wire perch; the little tuba runs of Oren Marshall are a nice touch. “Human of the Year,” churchly and solemn (at least tongue-in-cheek solemnity) and with a lovely, pealing sung chorus, revisits ideas first broached in “The Ghost of Corporate Future” from
Soviet Kitsch: the hapless middle-aged man buffeted by forces far larger than himself—in this case presented with the meaningless award of the song title. As with Spektor’s previous CD,
Begin to Hope (2006), the bonus tracks are more interesting than some of those not considered throw-ins. (Be forewarned that the first bonus song is preceded by some ten minutes of silence.) Even so, “Time Is All Around” and “The Sword & the Pen” (the bonus tracks on
Far) are not as quirky or enthralling as “Uh-Merica” or “Music Box” from the earlier recording. “The Sword & the Pen” contains the usual
Regina Spektor theological-philosophical musings (she cannot detach herself from her
Russian heritage, after all), but it is also, unusually for her, a sweetly tender and unabashedly romantic ballad. “Time Is All Around,” not one of her more inspired compositions, is perky but rambling, jump-cutting freely among its chin-rub-inducing imagery. Spektor used a variety of producers for the record, including Mike Elizondo, who has collaborated with various hip-hop groups,
Ireland’s Garret “Jacknife” Lee, who has worked with U2 and R.E.M., and Jeff Lynne, of Electric Light Orchestra fame. Lynne also plays guitars and bass on his tracks, while Matt Chamberlain, who has toured with Tori Amos (to whom Spektor is sometimes compared), plays drums on a number of songs. The CD package includes a DVD with four tracks from the album.
A-
A SUNNY DAY IN GLASGOW, Ashes Grammar—
Wispy, ethereal, and impressionistic are the adjectives that spring to mind to describe A Sunny Day in Glasgow. The band’s lineup is about as unstable as the abrupt mood changes on its recordings. One of the original cofounders, who named the group, is long gone, as are several others who participated in the making of the debut album,
Scribble Mural Comic Journal (2007). Since the current record was released, several new members have joined, for touring purposes at least. But
Ashes Grammar was a collaboration between guitarist and cofounder Ben Daniels, keyboardist/guitarist/drummer Josh Meakim, and singer/keyboardist/cellist Annie Fredrickson. It is a long record, clocking in at a little more than an hour, but, with twenty-two tracks, most of the selections are short, and some are little more than snippets. Most have lyrics of some kind, though Fredrickson’s voice is engineered to sound remote amid the sound collage, so emotional intimacy is not part of the equation. The band’s music has been categorized as “dream pop,” though as such it is less through-composed and structured than the songs of a band like
School of Seven Bells (see the 2008 music survey). On numbers where there is no singing, in particular, it can sound more like the sonically blurry ambient electronica of Boards of Canada (which actually is Scottish, unlike the all-American A Sunny Day in
Glasgow). Tracks tend to run together, and where they do not blend into one another, they can turn on a dime, in terms of rhythm and instrumental timbre. Because Fredrickson’s voice is not as strong as those of the Deheza sisters of
School of Seven Bells, it may be for the best that her singing is filtered through a screen of electronics. Lyrics are often
indistinct, and printed lyrics are not offered, while titles give little clue to the nature of songs (no vocoder appears on “West Philly Vocoder,” for instance). As I view it,
Ashes Grammar has two central tracks, both of which are excellent: “Close Chorus” and “Nitetime Rainbows.” Daniels has spoken in interviews about the difficulty of writing melodies, as opposed to music generally, but when he finds a good one, he latches on and takes it for an extended ride. Woozy synthesizers over a two-note guitar ostinato yield to a dazzling, harmonically rich sung theme that is by turns plaintive and affirmational over the course of nearly seven minutes in “Close Chorus,” the album’s longest cut. “Nitetime Rainbows” begins with a shimmering set of sustained tones before Fredrickson sketches out an easy, swingy theme that is also chromatically slippery, enough to be both aching and upbeat; when the drums or handclaps kick in, it is one of the few compositions with a danceable beat. The transition from “Nitetime Rainbows” to “
Canalfish” is so abrupt that you will wonder whether your CD player skipped. Some of the other tracks, such as “Blood White” (with its slightly off-key vocals), “Failure,” and “Starting at a Disadvantage,” lay out interesting thematic notions for which there is no real reworking or artistic progression, just dogged reiteration, while others (“Canalfish,” for example) are little more than intriguing samplings or motifs, the musical equivalent of a carpet swatch. The album’s oblique approach, its detached nature—the feeling of witnessing it unfold through a scrim—taxes my patience, ultimately. Perhaps next time we could hear the charmingly bittersweet melodic kernels and the gauzy
textures conveyed with a greater sense of
urgency and immediacy.
B+
[VARIOUS ARTISTS], Record Store Day Urban Sampler—I got this promotional sampler as an accident of having visited J&R Music World on Record Store Day. The disc puts together fourteen selections from Sony Music Entertainment’s stable of
labels associated with African-American genres, plus Sony Music Latin. While I do not care much for anything on the sampler, it is useful for taking the
temperature (tepid) of the denatured molasses that currently passes for rhythm and blues and neo-soul. Admittedly, I am not immune to the illusion that everything was better when we were kids, even the sorts of music we did not really listen to, that just sort of formed part of the periphery of our experience. Nonetheless, I do feel that black popular music was far more vital and original a few decades ago. The sampler proffers mainly formulaic pop in an “
urban” vein, though there is some variety in that the
labels have differing specialties. Smooth crooners like Raphael Saadiq (formerly of Tony! Toni! Toné!) and John Legend waste their talents on bland material. Legend’s “Everybody Knows” is instantly forgettable, and Saadiq’s derivative “
Never Give You Up” is notable primarily for the sweet little harmonica solo contributed by Stevie Wonder. Similarly, Bow Wow (once “Lil’ Bow Wow, until he grew up) has a voice that goes down easy, in falsetto or his normal register, and is merely marking time on the thuddingly literal “You Can Get It All.” Beyoncé struts (does she know how to do anything else?) smugly and betrays no hint of character or feeling on “Ego,” whose theme of egoism might apply as well to the singer as to the lover she is singing about. Charlie Wilson actually belongs to an older generation of singers, but you would
never know it listening to his “Back to Love,” in which the recording engineers show a refreshingly light touch on the Auto-Tune vocoder, which has become an R&B cliché. But, wait, there is far worse on this sampler album! Anthony Hamilton’s “Cool” is dreadful even by the standards of the R&B hit machine:
moronic lyrics, stunningly unimaginative verse and chorus, and
Hamilton’s voice is no match for Legend’s or Saadiq’s. Donnie McClurkin hides his less than stellar vocal chords behind the more accomplished
CeCe Winans, backed up by Yolanda Adams and Mary Mary, on “When You Love,” even though it is his song and his record; this is Grade A pabulum. Even more repellent than the least of the R&B ditties are the gospel tunes. A lot of people are swayed by the infectiousness of gospel; to me, it is like being pounded on the head with someone else’s religious fervor. More dismal still, judging by the lyrics of Donald Lawrence & Company’s “Let the Word Do the Work,” the authors of this gospel rap (maybe Lawrence himself) believe in so-called prosperity theology, the notion that the Lord will reward true believers by making them wealthy. And if you are not a true believer, even leaving theological considerations aside in favor of esthetics, the track is atrocious. Along similarly pious lines, if not strictly gospel, is Mary Mary’s “God in Me,” another song I would be happy never to listen to again. The rapper Aceyalone (a.k.a. Eddie Hayes) is basically ripping off the guitar line from “Stand By Me” to back his tiresome pickup lines on “The Lonely Ones.” Otherwise, the hip-hop actually comes as comic relief because it is a jolt of power to pump up a flaccid song collection—even as annoying as Jim Jones’s “Na Na Nana Na Na” is (which is every bit as annoying as the children’s teasing refrain, whether voiced by Jones himself or his cohort, Britney Taylor).
Missouri-born, gravel-voiced Stevie Stone shows some chops as a rapper, and his “Wait a Minute” throbs with the influence of techno and dancehall. Sony Latin’s one contribution to the mix is a mild
reggaeton called “Ojos que no Ven” (Eyes that Do Not See) by Alexis & Fido,
Puerto Rican rappers afflicted with a bad case of Auto-Tune. (“If the walls could speak, what would become of me?” the song asks in Spanish.) The one R&B track in the Sony lineup that I find moderately affecting is Jazmine Sullivan’s “Lions, Tigers & Bears.” I do not think that Sullivan is blessed with a wonderful voice, but she sings this melody with genuine soulfulness, showing pathos and vulnerability as she admits that embarking on a love relationship is a scarier prospect than the bogeymen that frightened her as a child. (Although I could not help imagining Brett Favre singing, “I’m not scared of the Lions and PACKERS and Bears.”) Now that is real songwriting! I suppose that anyone interested in getting hold of the sampler disc can contact Sony Music Entertainment.
C-
THOMAS WATKISS, Ancestor—Phase II: Machine—This “ambient electronica” seeks out a particular audience, those with the willingness to concentrate on long-form, minimalist sonic experimentation. It will be, to most ears, forbiddingly abstract, the musical equivalent of one of Richard Serra’s rusted steel sculptures. The closest thing to this in spirit in the 2008 music survey was the reissue of the 1970s-era Brian Eno-Robert Fripp collaboration,
No Pussyfooting. Ancestor—Phase II: Machine had a predecessor,
Phase I: Silence, which I do not have for purposes of comparison. Through the nine tracks of
Phase II, Watkiss is demonstrating what can be done with the manipulation of a single, sustained tone, by varying the dynamics, by introducing and phasing out overtones, undertones, and reverberations, by adding mechanical blips, twitters, whirrs, and hisses. As the album title suggests, the sounds conjure great machines in action; frequently, the prevailing timbre is a roaring hum, though there are times of greater quietude as well. The long tones do not always remain at constant pitch; rather, the periodic fading out of sound allows for different pitches to take their place. Although there are subtle differences between the pieces, the guiding concept is much the same throughout the record. For my taste, the most compelling composition is the next-to-last, “The Patience of Crows,” the only one that is kinetic enough to have a sequence of pitches (four of them), appearing at the outset and again in midstream and at the conclusion, that form a prototypical motif. The final piece, “Machine: Decease,” ends with a politician exhorting in full
Churchillian tenor that “production must go on if we are to win.” The album includes a bonus live CD,
Thomas Watkiss—Live at Lydgalleriet, recorded in
Bergen, Norway, in 2008. Its issuance raises the interesting question of what “live” signifies when all the music is preprogrammed and computer generated. When Watkiss appeared at
Sound Fix Records in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this past summer for a live performance of his work, it consisted of the artist setting up his laptop and gear and manipulating a few controls over the course of a half hour or so, otherwise just standing back and observing. Intriguingly, the live disc still had to be “produced” a year later in
New York, prior to its release. The live record is divided into two sets, lasting about forty-five minutes in toto: the shorter first set has a bit more going on, more drama than in
Ancestor—Phase II: Machine. It begins with sibilant sounds, more like what one might find at a planetarium show than on a factory floor; later, it becomes more mechanical, pierced repeatedly by the low blare of what sounds like a ship’s alarm. The second set is more like an extended version of the tracks from
Phase II, though it has sounds of dripping water near the beginning, fuzzily opaque snippets of a child’s babbling in the middle, and another speech toward the end, mostly too distorted to be intelligible, terminating with a man declaring everything to be under control. At the conclusion, Watkiss thanks the audience and invites them to consume the wine he has brought, much as he did at Sound Fix last summer. I can appreciate what Watkiss is attempting, even if at times it is hard to discern what constitutes “composition” or design in pieces that are so long, so glacial, and so relentlessly single-minded. Still, a little goes a long way; it is hard to imagine listening to this for fun, while as background music it is too disturbing and insistent to be soothing. For those who are interested in seeing how
industrial noise can be incorporated into more conventional pop, I would heartily recommend Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s
Dazzle Ships (1983) or
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993) by Stereolab.
B+
THE XX, The xx—Because I am naturally skeptical toward minimalism, I take a more acerbic view of the xx than the many critics smitten with the band’s dewy, tear-welling sincerity. Do not get me wrong: as wet behind the ears as founding members Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft are, at twenty years of age, they show remarkable facility working in their chosen idiom. There are no real missteps on the self-titled debut record, and that is in itself an achievement. But with spare arrangements and featherweight tunes all there is to go by, the band and its appraisers are setting a fairly low bar. The music is simply too primitive to be either catchy or moving. Moody, juddering bass notes, evoking the early 1980s Cure or another of the Brit new-wave-turned-new-Romantics bands, and ghostly tremulous keyboards back
breathy vocals giving shape to lyrics that are guileless, confessional and at times grandiose. (On “
Crystalised”: “Glaciers have melted to the sea/ I
wish the tide would take me over/ I’ve been down on my knees/ And you just keep on getting closer.”) Even the xx’s most fully formed and appealing melody, “Infinity,” falls short of the mark; its guitar chord sequence
essentially follows that of Chris Isaak’s “
Wicked Game” (1989), minus the raw emotional power that the cunning Isaak, who has been around the block once or twice, brings to his more full-bodied tune. “Crystalised” is the other number that stands somewhat apart for having enough momentum, heft and textural complexity to feel as though it had been created by warm-blooded creatures, not
Twilight vampires. Superficially, Sim and Madley Croft resemble Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan of Stars, a male-female duo trading off intimately personal lyrics sung with a characteristically flat affect that suggests a certain detachment. Yet, whereas
Campbell and Millan display expressive range on their recordings, the default setting for Sim and Madley Croft is always a kind of hand-across-forehead, woe-is-me pitch fade. While the xx’s debut is too rudimentary to encompass much sonic variation, there are several songs that are percussion-centered, most obviously “
Heart Skipped a Beat,” whose rhythms cleverly simulate the title, but also “
Islands” and “Basic Space.” Jamie Smith does not actually play drums; rather, he supplies the beat patterns electronically. He also mixed the album. At the opposite pole from “Heart Skipped a Beat,” the nearly wordless “Fantasy” floats, dreamlike, on a
cushion of soft, fuzzy synthesizer long tones, with no beats but a slow bass thrum that sets my speakers into a resonating buzz. Get ready for even more bare-bones arrangements, for the keyboard player,
Baria Qureshi, departed the group following the recording of
the xx, and there are no plans to replace her. The four (now three) band members met at the
Elliott School, a private school in the
London borough of Wandsworth, which has also graduated such musical luminaries as Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, William Bevan (a.k.a. ‘Burial’), Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), and the members of Hot Chip. I would be tempted to assign this record a grade of ‘incomplete,’ except that the band accomplished precisely what it set out to do—and did so with a certain flair.
B
ZERO 7, Yeah Ghost—The English duo of Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker won my Album of the Year for 2006 with their fine, understated
The Garden. Aside from having a dorkier name,
Yeah Ghost is both similar to and different from its predecessor. Although Zero 7 is commonly—and appropriately—classified as electronica, its music sits closer to conventional pop than to the
industrial or highly synthetic experimentation of Thomas Watkiss or Étienne Jaumet (see above for each). Binns and Hardaker have long shown a preference for the warmth of the human voice, especially the female voice, and have welcomed real, analog instrumentalists into the mix. Whereas prior releases relied heavily on the voice of
Australia’s Sia Furler to carry the tunes, the current one brings in
Zimbabwe-born,
London-raised Eska Mtungwazi as principal vocalist since Sia went off to launch her solo career. I had had exposure to Mtungwazi’s talents when she sang the music on the Matthew Herbert Big Band record
There’s Me and There’s You (see the 2008 music survey). I loved Sia, but understandably Mtungwazi, with her distinctive pedigree, brings something very different to the recording studio. The songs on which she performs (for many of which she had a writing credit) have a sass and verve all their own. Of the other noninstrumental pieces, English singer-songwriter Martha Tilston sings on “
Pop Art Blue,” while the mostly distorted vocals of Jackie Daniels (about whom little seems known except the sharing of a name with a female porn star) take over the theme of “Ghost Symbol, ” which is the most
downtempo- and
trip-hop-influenced composition on the record. “Sleeper,” also bearing the stamp of the trip-hop movement, as well as lounge and funk, adds the rap patter of Rowdy Superstar to Mtungwazi’s vocals. Binns himself solos on “Everything Up (Zizou),” a song meant as a tribute to retired French soccer midfielder Zinedine Zidane. The singer on the third track, “Swing,” is strangely uncredited. But “Swing” “Everything Up (Zizou),” and “Pop Art Blue,” which follow consecutively, hew closest to the sound of
The Garden, “Swing” because of its lilting, carnivalesque rhythm in the keyboards and steel drums and “Everything Up” because Binns seems to model his low-key singing style on that of José González, who also played a big part in the making of
The Garden. “
Pop Art Blue,” a decidedly chill tune seasoned by the banjo pluckings of Maynard O’Byrne, has the most Sia-like vocals, from Tilston. The three songs on which Mtungwazi alone solos, all saturated with the tang of soul, reflect different moods: “Mr. McGee” is funky in an agitated manner, with the singer’s cry echoing over a melody that is by turns plaintive and bracing, whereas “Medicine Man” is equally funky but with a jaunty and bouncy disposition, as she harmonizes with herself. “The Road” is a straightforward ballad that displays the softer, more sensitive side of Mtungwazi’s expressive powers, accompanied by electric piano and ornamentation in the upper ranges of the acoustic piano. The three instrumental numbers are thematically linked: the opening “Count Me Out,” the stand-alone final half-minute of the concluding “All of Us,” and “Solastalgia,” all brief forays with languid and dreamy synthesizer drones, guitar tremolos, and moans and whoops, punctuated by what sounds like an electronic rendition of a harmonica. The bulk of “All of Us” consists of mellow wordless vocalizing (Binns, presumably) over a hand drum pattern that sounds like talking drums. In
Yeah Ghost, Zero 7 has given us another supremely pleasurable record to enjoy.
A
“Hors de Combat” section
MISCELLANEOUS
MULATU ASTATKE, New York-Addis-London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975—This is a retrospective of the early career of multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger Mulatu Astatke, who pioneered a genre he calls “Ethio-jazz.” Mulatu’s most recent release, with the Heliocentrics,
Inspiration Information, Vol. 3 (2009), was named top album of the year by my friend Steve Holtje; see
http://www.culturecatch.com/music/best-new-rock-electronic-albums-2009. Mulatu Astatke came to broader attention when his music was used in the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s movie
Broken Flowers (2005); one instance of that, “Yègellé Tezena” (My Own Memory), is presented here. About a third of the twenty tracks on this long (seventy-six-plus minutes) CD are sung; the remainder are instrumentals. The singers are invariably male, with high, reedy tenor voices; the extreme example is Menelik Wossenatchew, who on “Fikratchin” (Our Love) could be mistaken for a woman with deep pipes. Other singers sound cantorial at times in their
melisma, underscoring the cultural and linguistic links between the peoples of East Africa and the
Middle East. The CD descriptions of each song and background information are excellent, except that the credits fail to list the instrumentalists. Mulatu performed with several different lineups in the West and in
Ethiopia, but their memberships are generally a mystery here, except that Girma Beyene is noted as the pianist on “Fikratchin,” and Frank Holder plays steel pans to add a bit of calypso spice to “Asiyo Bellema” (no translation provided). Mulatu himself plays at various times vibraphone, piano, organ, and percussion. What is astonishing about this compilation is its brilliant fusion of
Ethiopian melodies with Western instrumentation, harmonics, and rhythms. The melodies often sound otherworldly because traditional
Ethiopian music is based on four modes particular to that culture. Despite using a pentatonic scale, these do not sound “oriental,” with the exception of “
Ené Alantchie Alnorem” (I Can’t Live without You), in which a flute and Lee Ritenour-like guitar take turns limning a rapturous, mellow, vaguely Asiatic theme, backed by bass guitar and light percussion and a wind machine that to today’s ears seems a bit cheesy as an effect. But these compositions are also very much a product of their time and can strike the listener as funky or “mod” in a very late-sixties, early-seventies kind of way, especially those that are completely original (not based on traditional tunes). “Yèkatit” (February) and “Nètsanèt” (Freedom) were both written at the dawn of the 1974 revolution that dethroned Haile Selassie and ushered in the ugliest period in
Ethiopia’s modern history, and a dark sense of foreboding colors both. Each has a funk-driven bass line, a main theme in the horns, and some space for improvisation by the guitar, organ, or flute. “Yègellé Tezena,” “Kasalèfkut Hulu” (The Times I Have Spent), and “Mulatu” betray brassy influences from West African
highlife music. But most startling is how many tracks find inspiration in Afro-Cuban music, beginning with the second track, “I Faram Gami I Faram” (The Youth Are Not Afraid). This song melds an
Ethiopian warrior song with a classic bouncy Latin piano vamp, a
montuno, and handclaps; furthering the mix, a verse sung in Spanish gives way to a presumably Amharic chorus. (The lead singer is uncredited.) The piece starts and ends with a bit of elephantine braying in the horns. Even some of the songs that are not overtly “Latin” carry Afro-Cuban elements: listen to the arpeggiated harmonic elements in “Emnete” (My Belief) or the slightly modified
clave rhythm behind the vibraphone-driven “Mascaram Setaba” (For the New Year). Perhaps because of
Ethiopia’s relative isolation (Mulatu returned to the country in 1969, following an education and professional stint abroad), the Latin-inspired pieces mainly seem preserved in amber from the mambo era of the 1950s and early 1960s, though they were composed at a time when popular trends in the genre were moving toward salsa and a harder edge. The one forward-looking exception is “The Girl from
Addis Ababa,” written in 1966, a song that would not seem out of place in
New York or
San Juan even years later. One of the non-Latin gems is “Dèwèl” (
Bell), whose alien-sounding traditional funerary theme is heightened by saxophone attacks and stop-time flurries that are very modernistic
indeed. Museum piece or not, this is a recording of unflagging interest.
A
OUMOU SANGARÉ, Seya—The queen of
Mali’s Wassoulou musical tradition, Oumou Sangaré.is well established, but this was my first exposure.
Wassoulou music, according to the African Music Encyclopedia, is pentatonic but also displays inflections from Arabic traditions. Typical subjects are hunting and the harvest; songs of praise and devotion are common as well. Sangaré sings in Bambara, and translations into French and English are in the CD booklet. I must say that I find her prescriptive and didactic lyrics off-putting; then again, what is commonplace in the West in terms of the freedom and choices available to women looks very different in the more paternalistic cultures of
West Africa. The praise songs also can seem peculiar to the Western ear, both in their specificity about persons, places, and customs for which we lack cultural reference points and in their at times unabashed egotism. (“I tell my mother to thank the good Lord for having a child like me.”) If the words are not easy to relate to, there is always the infectious music, much of it designed for dancing. Sangaré and her producers (she herself co-produced), namely, pros such as Nick Gold and Yves Wernert—veterans of working with a host of African musicians—gathered a large assemblage of musicians that numbered several Westerners among them, including two violinists (Christophe Raymond and Anthony Leung), jazz drummer Winston Clifford, and a couple of former members of James Brown’s band, saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis and trombonist Fred Wesley, both of whom appear on the title track. But primacy is naturally given to traditional instruments, notably the
kamele ngoni (lute), the
balafon (a marimba-like instrument), the
bolon (bridge harp), the
karignan (scraper), and the
djembé and talking drums. The
balafon, which makes an appearance in the opening track, “Sounsoumba,” as well as “Djigui,” “Iyo Djeli,” and “Mogo Kele,” has a clanky, metallic, otherworldly sound reminiscent of the
likembe thumb pianos used by the Congolese group Konono No. 1 (see the 2007 music survey). Sangaré has a strong and clear, rather low voice; much of the vocals take the form of call and response between the singer and her female backing vocalists. Several songs, even if the message is locally focused, seem designed to cater to a worldwide audience; such is the case with “Sounsoumba,” named after a type of tree. It rails against forced marriage but does so in a swingy, uptempo way, with a jazzy flute spinning harmonies around the ensemble of traditional and modern strings. “Kounadya” (Lucky Star), my favorite track, is even groovier and more modernistic, with syncopations and rhythm changes to keep the listener off balance. “Seya” mainly describes in painstaking detail a clothes-shopping and hair-styling spree but does so with fervor in the singer's and chorus’s verse-refrain exchange and with stylish funk in the bass and
ngonis and horns. “Wele Wele Wintou,” another song opposing forced marriage, starts with the
karignan and keeps up a fierce momentum throughout, with vigorous bass accompaniment and a sax chorus for seasoning. The song in which the pentatonic melody sounds most East Asian is “Djigui”; taken at a relaxed but not slow tempo in 3/4, its exoticism is accentuated by Ahmed Fofana’s
Peul flute. To a less pronounced degree, such “oriental” flavor graces the faster and more percussive (
balafon-heavy) “Iyo Djeli,” a praise offering to a female
griot of the 1960s. Of the slower and more traditional-sounding songs, the best is “Sukunyali,” sung in the Soninké language, which renders homage to those of the Maure ethnic group who have gone abroad to make a living. The other tunes of this nature get a little tiresome from repetitiveness. In fact, the piece I liked least on
Seya is the most traditional of all: “Donso,” the only selection not written by Sangaré, is a traditional hunting song, rambling, more spoken than sung, and, in the final analysis, tedious. Not everything that is old is necessarily better.
A-/B+
TINARIWEN, Imidiwan: Companions—With the passing of Ali Farka Touré in 2006, the Western-devised title of
Mali’s “king of the desert blues” has perhaps passed to Tinariwen, whose very name means “deserts” in the Tamashek language of the Tuaregs. The band’s founders, Ibrahim ag Alhabib (“ag” means “son of”) and the late Inteyeden ag Ablil, were certainly influenced by non-Tuaregs like Touré, as well as
raï and Berber musicians from
Algeria, Moroccan and
Egyptian pop, and even
American rockers of the 1970s whose music filtered down through bootleg cassettes. But their “bluesy” style, known as
assouf, is genuinely
indigenous; only the guitars used to play it are an import. The modern electric guitars and basses are complemented by traditional Tuareg melodies and the drum called the
tindé. Tinariwen’s membership is floating but includes certain core members, such as Ibrahim, Alhassane ag Touhami (“Le Lion”), Abdallah ag Alhoussenyni, Eyadou ag
Leche, Elaga ag Hamid, and Abdallah ag Lamida (“Intidao”). Lead vocals are sung by men, with backing singers either men or a women’s chorus. The lyrics are often about rebellion and revolution, sometimes with harsh words for “traitors,” reflecting Tuareg chafing against central government authority, although the group members insist they are solely musicians now. The sound on
Imidiwan is rich and varied but not quite as gripping as on the group’s previous release,
Aman Iman: Water Is Life (see the 2007 music survey). The music succeeds in sounding both exotic, conjuring the Saharan desertscapes of its creation, and in some way familiar (the guitar blues element), which helps explain the band’s popularity outside
Africa. Western ideas of exposition and development are alien to Tinariwen, which typically presents a musical idea in the opening phrases and spends the rest of the song reiterating it, with slight embellishments such as call-and-response chorus. The exception is “Ere Tasfata Adounia” (He Who Values Life), which picks up speed midstream, completely altering the song’s sensibility. Tempos tend to alternate between the contemplative and the loping pace of an unburdened camel; little on the record is taken faster. “Lulla,” one of the standout pieces on the album, moves briskly, though, to drums and handclaps, with women’s ululations in the background; that and “Tenhert” (The Doe) are the only songs that really “rock.” “Kel Tamashek” (The Tamashek People) has a rapid and rolling beat of its own but is otherwise a quiet piece with an insistent guitar pattern and sung verse, very different from “Lulla.” “Imazeghen n
Adagh” (Tuareg of the
Adagh) is particularly stirring as a call to action; taken at a stately gait, it bids Tuareg men to shake off
indolence and get back in the camel’s saddle. The quintessential bluesy composition is “Assuf ag Assuf” (Assuf, Son of Assuf), meditative and dreamlike, haunted by echoey, note-bending guitars. In fact, the
further a song veers harmonically from the
assouf model, the less appealing: major-mode-sounding numbers like “Imidiwan Afrik Temdam” (My Friends from All Over Africa) at the beginning of the record, “Intitlayaghen,” or “Chabiba” (Youth) are the weakest. The CD ends with a four-minute-plus soft guitar drone called “
Desert Wind.” Also included is a DVD lasting about half an hour, offering snippets of songs—some from this record, some not—as well as desert visuals to supplement those in the CD booklet.
A-/B+
LATIN
CYRO BAPTISTA’S BANQUET OF THE SPIRITS, Infinito—.Although Cyro Baptista has been performing as a percussionist for many years, his recording career as a bandleader goes back only a dozen or so years. Having made a name with his group Beat the Donkey, Baptista has assembled a new floating group of musicians called Cyro Baptista’s Banquet of the Spirits for the new CD, with considerable overlap of membership between the two ensembles. Baptista, who shares with fellow Brazilian performing artist Tom Zé the singular trait of looking bug-eyed and like a borderline insane genius in photos, plays an enormous range of percussion: some conventional instruments, some ordinary objects recruited into the service, and some that he devised himself, following in the Brazilian tradition of Hermeto Pascoal.
Infinito is an entertaining swirl of styles, though not without shortcomings. Given Baptista’s métier, it should not be surprising that the most intriguing compositions are the percussion-dominated bagatelles he created. On “In Vitrous,” apart from some soft electric piano chords from Cadu Costa and a light sprinkling of electronic effects at the introduction by Ikue Mori (who shares with Baptista a connection to John Zorn and his circle of downtown musicians), it is all Baptista, on a range of instruments: to take just the glass ones, “glass tree, glass
udu, glass cannon, glass bottles” (no glass harmonica—I guess that would be too pedestrian). There is also a “cyrimba,” a marimba of Baptista’s own design, presumably, and something called a “hagdini” (??). An item in the liner notes reads, “All glass instruments were built for Cyro by George Kennard, sponsored by Corning Museum of Glass.” Try, in your mind’s ear, to conceive of the classic samba street beat played on wind chimes and the necks of wine bottles and you’ve got “In Vitrous” down. “Coronation of a Slave Queen,” the shortest piece at less than two minutes, begins with ominous synthesizer tones from Peter Scherer but is primarily about the “jungle” rhythms one can produce from the
cassa grande bass drum, leavened by various high-pitched sonic effects from the
waterphone. “Cantor Cuidadoso” (Cautious Singer) bounces to the springy sound of a mouth harp, woodblock, and the tambourine-like
pandeiro as Cadu Costa speech-sings in quasi-hip-hop fashion, while “Blindman” tick-tocks along to an array of percussion (
surdo, talking drums, thunder drum) and other instruments as varied as the Indonesian
anklun (a set of bamboo pipes that are shaken), “gas pipe,” and waterphone, even as a melancholy theme is taken up by Erik Friedlander’s cello. The compositions that are more broadly melodic are less enticing because they are too much like jazz lite, peppy and vapid, a little too eager to please. This applies to both pieces on which jazz woodwind virtuoso Anat Cohen solos (not her fault), “Batida de Côco” (Coconut Shake) and “
Kwanza,” and, to a lesser degree, to “Pro Flávio.” “Batida de Côco,” co-written by Baptista, Pascoal, and Teese Gohl, does have the novelty of a brief
cuica solo in the middle. “
Kwanza,” written by the band’s keyboard player, Brian Marsella, contains a nice little stop-time section midstream that features a snippet of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whereas “Pro Flávio” is rescued from a trite principal theme by lively and acrobatic acoustic guitar improvising from Brazilian expatriate Romero Lubambo, who also wrote the song. “Noia” (Boredom), a collaboration between Baptista and Lubambo that showcases the wordless vocals of Pamela Briggs and Lubambo’s daughter, Luisa, sounds—deliberately, one would think—like some vaguely recalled bossa nova tune. The album is bookended by its title track. “Infinito: Coming” was co-written by Baptista and Scott Kettner, the frontman for a group called Maracatu
New York, and features that group in performance. (I had to double-check to make sure the percussionist Sharon Epperson was not the identically named CNBC markets correspondent.) It actually puts me in mind of Celtic music, with a lilting flute line, droning melodica and violin, and a big, booming bass—or maybe it was just that it was St. Patrick’s Day when I got around to analyzing this song closely. “Infinito: Going” has the same melody but much quieter percussion, limited to birdcalls, “vacuum cleaner hose,” Chinese gong, and the like. This puts front and center the trio of flute, melodica, and
oud, the last of these played by Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz of Pharaoh’s Daughter. In particular, the dolorous flute of Jorge Continentino makes the closing piece redolent of Continentino’s own band, Forro in the Dark (see above, in the mainstream pop section).
A-/B+
RUBÉN BLADES, Cantares del Subdesarrollo—Hard to believe, but the salsa icon and onetime star of
Crossover Dreams (1985) as well as pipe-dream candidate for the presidency of Panama (in 1994) is now sixty-one years old. Blades is starting to look his age, but his voice is as suave as ever. Having had a hiatus from recording of several years while he completed a term as
Panama’s minister of tourism, he is back to touring and making music and is living in
New York once more.
Cantares del Subdesarrollo (Songs of Underdevelopment) was recorded without Blades’s usual band, Seis del Solar. Though he stresses that the body of music he has created across a forty-year career forms a continuous arc, as depicted in his stage show
Maestra Vida (Life the Teacher, 1997), in recent years, he has been adopting a plainer style, aiming for a folk/popular sound such as might emanate from the watering holes of the
barrio. The current disc is mostly Blades himself, on various guitars including the six-string
tres cubano, bongos, cowbell, or maracas, accompanied by a few percussionists, in addition to which Walter Flores plays flute on “Olaya.” Strangely, the throaty male singer who duets with Blades on “Moriré” (I Will Die) is not credited anywhere I can find. Because the songs are nearly all ballads, with similar rhythms and instrumentation, they are, with a few exceptions, more or less interchangeable. This does not have to be the case; that it is points to less than inspired composition. Also, the song stories, whether personal or the political allegories to which Blades has always been drawn, tend to outweigh the tunes, reducing the music to mere setting. The first four tracks on
Cantares del Subdesarrollo, together with tracks seven through nine, are pleasant enough, tropically languid, accompanied by gentle strumming and relaxed Afro-Cuban rhythms in the congas. “El Reto” (The Challenge) and “Bendición” (Blessing) morph into warmly supple melodies in the chorus, but that is not enough to spare them from sounding generic. The one song that leaves me cold from the start is “El Tartamudo” (The Stammerer), a tragicomic encounter between a lustful down-and-out type and an aging prostitute; its mock-operatic outbursts and bits of narrative emphasis strike me as forced and awkward, and the tune rambles all over the place before finding anchor in the disappointed suitor’s pitiable refrain. The music takes a slight turn with “Olaya,” the fifth track; the instrumentation is much the same, but this is a crooner’s song, almost soft rock set to a Latin beat, depicting a dream about “Olaya, Queen of the Sea,” which is interrupted by an alarm clock. The following number, “Segunda Mitad del Noveno” (Bottom of the Ninth), consists mainly of a
clave rhythm over which Blades’s voice ranges freely; eventually, a bare-bones chorus shows up. The song’s concept follows along the lines of “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” with vanished titans named “Musíu” and “Bob Canel”; I was not able to dig up anything on “Musíu,” but Bob Canel appears to have been a Panamanian sportscaster of the 1950s. The other song that is a departure from the norm is “Himno de los Olvidados” (Hymn of the Forgotten), a workers’ anthem sung a cappella by a men’s chorus that is interrupted after about one minute by an angry voice cursing about the men singing “communist” slogans and making noise in the night, after which the sound quickly dies away. The most pointedly political song is “País Portátil” (Portable Country), which speaks of a land with mortgaged ideals and falsified heroes, offered for sale cheap with the help of foreign loans, but it is hardly alone in its outspokenness. In “Las Calles” (The Streets), “on my street, life and death dance with a beer in one hand.” “Símbolo” (Symbol) talks about what the national flag signifies and represents; it is reprised at the end of the record with lyrics slightly amended to be Panama-specific, ending by singing of “my
Panama Canal.” Accentuating the down-home aspect of the record, there are various spasms of gruff exhortation or shouts and several instances when one can hear dogs baying, growling, or barking in the background (on “El Tartamudo,” “Bendición,” and “Himno de los Olvidados”). The Spanish-only lyrics are accessible at
http://www.rubenblades.com/los-cantares/. Note that the track list on both the CD jacket and the lyrics page on Blades’s own website reverses the order of “Símbolo” and “Moriré.”
B+
JUAN CALLE AND HIS LATIN LANTZMEN, Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos—Subtitled “Yiddish Favorites in Latin Tempos,” this 1961 recording was resurrected by the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation from the archives of
Riverside Records, a
New York jazz
label whose catalogue was subsequently taken over by California-based Concord Records. First issued at a time when the mambo craze had been succeeded by other Latin dance sensations, it was something of a lark even in its day—Jewish musicians appropriating Latin forms was common enough; the reverse was not. “Juan Calle” was actually John Cali, an Italian-American banjo player; he brought the band together for this recording session and handled the arrangements. Of the “Lantzmen,” only two were actually Jewish: the singer, Ed Powell, and the flutist/clarinetist, Shelley Russell, neither man renowned in musical circles. The other musicians, by contrast, were an all-star cast: Charlie Palmieri (the late brother of Eddie Palmieri) on piano;
Ray Barretto on congas and bongos; Wendell Marshall on bass; Willie Rodríguez on timbales; Clark Terry, Lou Oles, and Doc Cheatham on trumpets; plus Cali himself on the lute. The songs were mostly drawn from the already long moribund Yiddish musical theater and set to popular Spanish Caribbean (there is also one “samba”) dances. On hearing the opener, the schmaltzy “Beltz, Mein Shtetele Beltz” (My Town of Belz), dressed up as a fast-moving
pachanga, the natural reaction is laughter, but you are laughing with, not at, the music. The novelty aspect wears off fairly quickly; for one thing, the next number, “Havah Nagilah” (which is Hebrew, not Yiddish, for “let us rejoice”), has been
hammed up so often at public ceremonies that the Lantzmen rendition is not all that far off what any bar mitzvah band for hire might play. For another, the remaining tracks on the record are far less familiar; at least, they were to me. As pros, however, the musicians treat the music respectfully. The record is organized so that three songs performed without words sit in the middle (in fact, “Glick, Du Bist Gekummen Tzu Shpait” [Happiness, You Came Too Late] and “Papirossen” [which is about an orphan boy] have lyrics in their original form), surrounded on each side by four sung tracks.
Powell, whose day job apparently was as a sound engineer, has a voice that is adequate at best, neither strong nor compelling, and this detracts from the listening experience. No such complaints about the other Jew on the disc: Russell, the itinerant musician, holds his own, sufficiently schooled in
charanga method to handle the flute runs, if occasionally a little more looseness would have helped. He also revels in the note-bending clarinet flourishes of the klezmer style, particularly on “Freilach a Nacht” (Happiness at Night), his own composition (the one piece that is novel to this record), on which he gives the other musicians generous room to solo as well.
Mazel Tov, Mis Amgios’ hybrid strikes the ear as odd: the lachrymose theme of Herman Yablokoff’s“Papirossen” reconceived as a fast mambo, for example, yet the arrangements are so good that the cut would sit comfortably on a mid-1950s Tito Puente record; “Die Greene Koseene,” which is “the classic 1920s Abe Schwartz ode to a greenhorn cousin on the Lower East Side” according to the liner notes, takes on the rolling beat of merengue, with plenty of free-flowing piano
montunos and horn choruses, always ending in a staccato cha-cha-cha. The final three songs on the album are well known to those acquainted with Yiddish music. “Baigelach/Bublitchki” (Bagels/Hot Rolls), a song about a street vendor that was covered by Gogol Bordello, among others, is given an uncustomarily rapid metronomic tempo set by the timbales, and this becomes a platform for Palmieri and one of the trumpeters to solo creatively. Even more incongruous is Nellie Casman’s 1922 Yiddish stage number “Yossel, Yossel” (Joseph, Joseph) as a stately cha-cha. Last but not least is “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein” (To Me, You Are Beautiful), written in 1932 by Sholom Secunda for an operetta titled
I Would if I Could, transformed into another rumbling merengue pretext for the piano, flute, and trumpets to unleash all restraint; even Cali’s old-fashioned lute takes a solo turn, sounding for all the world like Greek
rembetika. Technically,
Greece is
Eastern Europe, but this bit just adds a
further element of strangeness to an unusual recording.
A-/B+
CUCU DIAMANTES, Cuculand—What limited exposure I have had to
New York-based Latin “fusion” band Yerba Buena (“good herb” or “good weed”), typically in a live outdoor setting, has left me with ambivalent feelings. Now the band’s lead singer, CuCu Diamantes (“crazy diamonds”; her real name is
Ilena Padrón), has put out a solo record. Reportedly of Spanish, French, African, and Chinese ancestry (one-upping former Mets pitcher Ron Darling in terms of diversity), Diamantes participated in the Paz sin Fronteras (Peace without Borders) benefit concert that the
Colombian superstar Juanes staged in her native
Havana in September, causing no end of squawking in the Cuban exile community here; a school in Union City, New Jersey, canceled a scheduled concert of hers, and one blogger pronounced her “artistic death” because her trip was helping sustain a dying regime. I would not go nearly that far, but I would call
Cuculand an artistic misfire. Since Diamantes is married to her co-founder of Yerba Buena, Andrés Levin, the band is not going away anytime soon, which is probably a good thing. On
Cuculand, she is attempting to reinvent herself as a torch singer, with mixed but generally infelicitious results. In video clips, she has undeniable charisma and style, and her moderately deep voice is appealing but not sensational—she will not be putting Paloma San Basilio out of work anytime soon. If singing is not the issue here, the material she has to work with is. The music was written primarily by Levin (who also produced the record and played all the guitars), with contributions from Yotuel Romero of the
Cuban émigré hip-hop group Orishas and former Spanish teen soap opera star turned pop idol Beatriz Luengo.
Romero was a co-producer, helped with the keyboards and horn arrangements, and sang backup on several tracks, notably “Alguien” (Someone), on which he had a featured part. Oddly, he is credited in the liner notes with the vocals for the initial track, but “Overture,” which appears to have been recorded live in a club, has only a spoken introduction, given by a man using the antique
Cuban
voz de la vieja (voice of the old woman); on the AOL video clip, it is clearly not Romero but a midget in a sombrero introducing Diamantes to the audience. Diamantes wrote all the lyrics herself, so she is fully complicit in the record’s shortcomings. “Cuculand” seems to be populated by women wounded by love, some pining for lost romances, others determined to move ahead, Gloria Gaynor-style. Following the intro are two ballads that are agreeable, though their melodies sound like rehashes of old Latin pop themes. “Más Fuerte” (Stronger) is the more interesting of the two: set to a languidly strummed guitar accompaniment resembling a
Dominican
bachata, it has two choruses, in the first of which a jilted lover sounds defiant and in the second, not so certain of her bravado, yet Diamantes waxes so insistent that she is exhorting more than singing. “Mentiras” (Lies) is brassier (showcasing Brian Lynch on trumpet) and has a loping rhythm; following the culmination of the theme (about envy and schadenfreude), it briefly devolves into a dialogue between the singer and the uncredited
voz de la vieja. The two uptempo numbers that come after “Mentiras” are the album’s
high point. “Still in Love” is a big production number thrumming with electronics and a booming beat. Only the refrain is sung (partly) in English, yet, toward the end, there is a genuine surprise as most sound dies away, leaving a residue of tabla and
dhol drums, over which Diamantes chants a new refrain in
Punjabi. “Alguien” has a bit of everything thrown in: unrestrained horn charts, merengue-like saxophone
jaleos (jittery figurations), whoops, and wryly ironic lyrics about “someone who understands me as I understand myself,” which apparently consists of satisfying a long list of luxe desires. As for Yotuel Romero’s verse section of the song, he gives an oddly
flat
delivery to his rather menacing blandishments but overdubs them by shouting some of the same phrases for emphasis. Just before the chorus, and again at the end of the “Alguien,” Diamantes spits out incredibly rapidly a tongue-twister in Spanish; it will leave your head spinning. Of the remaining songs, “Amor Crónico” (Chronic Love) is not half bad, as a midtempo number that sounds like a Spanish-language R&B number, and “Vengo,” which rounds out the track list, is modestly satisfying as a moderate-tempo dance tune, more subdued and less exuberant than the other danceable tracks. The rest of the songs, such as a lugubrious, horn- and accordion-filled cumbia, “Sentimiento” (Feeling), can be written off. The most striking thing about
Cuculand is the album cover: Diamantes lounges elegantly on a chaise in an extraordinary limb-baring and feathered ensemble from an earlier era, with bangles and polka-dot high heels. Things are going well for her in her chosen profession, but if not, she could always be a lingerie model.
B/B-
JAZZ
BEN ALLISON, Think Free—Like Dave Douglas and other forty-something jazz composers, double bass player Ben Allison doubtless grew up listening to pop music, and that influence finds expression in his songwriting. As a result, in at least a couple of instances (I am thinking of “Fred,” the first track, and “Green Al,” the final track), the melodies or harmonies may sound like something you have heard previously. And, if you have listened to Ben Allison before, most likely you have anyway. He is a compulsive recycler of his own music; accordingly, two of the eight tracks, all of which were written by the bassist, on
Think Free originated in earlier recordings: “Peace Pipe” (from the album of the same name, 2002) and “Green Al” (from
Buzz, 2004), while “Sleeping Giant” revisits his “R&B Fantasy,” also from
Buzz, and “Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Godzilla” (a title borrowed from the 1984 movie
This Is Spinal Tap, which in turn took the notion from a 1980
Saturday Night Live skit) is briefly reprised as “Vs. Godzilla.” Thus, only the first four songs are truly novel. The founder of the Jazz Composers Collective, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the work of “forward-thinking composers” (a sideways jab at “backward-looking” Wynton Marsalis and his acolytes, perhaps?) until its dissolution in 2005, Allison has been on the
New York scene for nearly two decades, leading various ensembles with names like Peace Pipe, Medicine Wheel, and Man Size Safe. For the current disc, he recruited the noted jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman, along with Shane Endsley, trumpet; Steve Cardenas, electric guitar; and Rudy Royston, drums/percussion. Bands led by the bass player are an oddity, especially since the instrument tends to get lost in any group larger than a threesome, and this is an unusual lineup, sort of a string trio with trumpet and drums. Jazz purists might sniff because much of the CD, rather than swinging, is set to a gentle rock beat, played straight. The pop sensibility is heightened by some Charlie Daniels-ish (“The Devil Went Down to
Georgia,” 1979) fiddle yowling by Scheinman on “Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Godzilla” and
Cardenas’s Claptonesque (“Layla,” 1970) guitar on “Platypus.” More typically, though, the guitar is used as a rhythm instrument, while the main themes and improvisational twists are taken up by Endsley’s trumpet and Scheinman’s violin.
Cardenas does get to spell out the primary harmonic subtheme of “Green Al,” which, as I noted when I reviewed
Buzz for the 2004 music survey, makes me think of a certain pop/Muzak staple from the 1960s or 1970s whose name I cannot recall. The easygoing, soulful tune is meant to evoke the music of Al Green—the politically minded Allison has now, however, rededicated it to Al Gore and his environmental advocacy. “Peace Pipe” has an
African lilt to its ostinato, establishing the piece’s harmonic grounding at the outset, which was played by a
kora in the original, here replicated by the strings. The trumpet then takes up the main theme, while Scheinman’s variations start with pizzicato technique and are later bowed. The song is long enough that even
Cardenas gets a solo turn. “Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Godzilla,” to a slow rock beat, is powered by a pulsating guitar note; Endsley limns a stately, compelling theme, to which Scheinman’s gritty, swooping virtuoso turn provides startling contrast. The reprise, “Vs. Godzilla,” is largely rhythmic: it has the same pulsing, this time mainly in the drums, and a taste of the jagged violin figurations, above which the muted trumpet insistently hoots two-tone oscillations. “Sleeping Giant” begins rambunctiously, with strings rampant yet without any discernible rhythm; only a minute into the piece does the bass pattern (played on guitar) from “R&B Fantasy” kick in. The violin doubles the trumpeter’s main theme. Endsley’s improvisations shift rapidly between playing freely and using the plunger; toward the end, he lets loose and really blows. “Fred,” set to a midtempo beat, has the comforting familiarity of something Steely Dan might have written; it is as eager to please as a
Labrador retriever. “Platypus,” with a more irregular beat, is a true ensemble piece—all thematic development, no improv; its harmonic “frown lines” recall the music of Radiohead (see above, in the pop music section).
A-
ANTHONY BRAXTON/MARAL YAKSHIEVA, Improvisations (Duo) 2008—Anthony Braxton’s music blurs the boundaries of jazz and classical. In several significant regards, the music on these two discs, published by the Russian SoLyd Records label, is not jazz at all. It exists outside of regular meter, so there is no “swing.” It sounds more like modern classical than jazz. Moreover, Braxton, who is the father of Tyondai Braxton (see above, in the main pop music section), himself denies that he is a jazz musician, preferring not to be categorized at all. On the other hand, the music is improvisatory (100 percent, in fact), and Braxton’s instrument, the saxophone, although appearing in some classical music of the past century, is much more typically a jazz instrument. Braxton early in his career took part in the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which promoted cutting-edge jazz and classical experimentation, the sort of thing Wynton Marsalis rails against because it removes jazz from its popular roots. For this double album, he paired with a pianist named Maral Yakshieva, about whom I knew nothing, most likely because of her origins in
Turkmenistan, a country that recedes far into the nether regions of the consciousness of all but oil/gas traders and human rights advocates. It is possible that Braxton chose to partner with Yakshieva precisely because of her low profile; she has, however, worked with other jazz musicians, including Braxton’s fellow AACM member Roscoe Mitchell, and has shown in her work a bent toward experimentalism and boundary crossing between genres. Although none of the music is in sonata form, it takes on certain characteristics of a saxophone sonata: often, Yakshieva’s piano seems to be accompanying Braxton’s sax; rarely does the reverse appear to be the case. So it is not an equal partnership, though there are times when both players are industriously improvising in concert. Braxton plays a wide range of saxophones, not just the standard members of the family; here, he seems to switch periodically between the soprano and alto saxes, with occasional deep forays into the baritone end. The two discs each consist of a single improvisation, lasting between fifty minutes and one hour. The music is rigorous in its modernity, giving no quarter to tonality, if by definition loose in structural terms. Because it is formless and has no sense of progression, it taxes the attention span, even as quieter and more contemplative passages give way to aggressive runs and flourishes, just as abruptly melting back into serenity. Toward the end of Improvisation 1, there is an extended outburst of gritty timbres and spluttering showers of notes from Braxton—who knew the old man had that much breath in him? The session then eases back into the quasi-songfulness (still atonal) that it allows for in isolated spots. Improvisation 2 is generally less caustic and volatile; not that it lacks for its own fulminating passages and attenuated honks, but as it lets down its guard a bit, it allows for a hint of playfulness and more of an emotional response. Otherwise, the whole twin-disc set risks coming across as an arid cerebral exercise, conducted under the auspices of the music department at Wesleyan University (where Braxton is now based), or a mere sport, witnessing two accomplished musicians tossing around one idea after another to test each other’s adaptability on the fly.
B+
FLY, Sky & Country—The muted, dusky palette and relaxed tempos of
Sky & Country, the second album by the trio Fly, recall some of the work of saxophonist Marty Ehrlich. This is evident from the very first track, the bittersweetly melodic and tightly focused “Lady B.” Fly consists of Mark Turner, who has led his own group and has played in Dave Holland’s big band and with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, on saxophones, Larry Grenadier on double bass, and Jeff Ballard on drums and percussion. Grenadier and Ballard also form the rhythm section of Brad Mehldau’s trio. The members of Fly take turns writing the tracks on
Sky & Country, and, although the sax is clearly at the forefront, the others find some space for self-expression as well. The CD is subdued to a fault—at certain junctures in these long-form pieces, there just is not enough happening to keep me attuned. In particular, the ten-minute-plus “Anandananda,” written by Turner for his young son, strikes me as slack and aimless and generates little heat as it sprawls across its several discrete sections; the title track also idles and marks time through much of its course, although it manages to build substantial momentum just before the close. The group frequently eschews the standard approach of introducing a theme briefly and following up with free-form interpretation; instead, themes are often developed extensively. Turner has noted, for example, that his “Elena Berenjena” (Elena Eggplant), parts of which carry a steady, rock-like drumbeat, is mostly an exercise in cultivating the melody rather than using it as a basis for roaming improvisation. The track that is easiest for the ear to latch onto is Grenadier’s unhurried, bluesy “CJ,” in no small part because its primary melody sounds something like the song “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” from the 1969 movie
The Happy Ending. Also straightforward melodically is the closing number, Turner’s “Super Sister,” more briskly paced than most on the record, which is then worked over obsessively with arpeggiated patterns from both the bass and the tenor sax. Ballard’s “
Perla Morena” (Dark Pearl) has a nice sense of motion and a restless, wide-ranging (not particularly “Latin”) theme. “Transfigured” introduces a somber theme with stark pitch contrast between the soprano sax and some very deep bass bowing by Grenadier, who wrote the composition. The song morphs a couple of times, gaining pace (after a meterless start) and brightening, as Turner’s trills and modal improvisations become businesslike yet unmoored to tonal phrasing, before lapsing back into the stop-time funereality of the opening section. “Dharma Days” appeared originally on Turner’s final record (of the same name as the track, in 2001) with Warner Bros. as leader of his own band; intriguingly, it is more notable for its rapid walking bass and deft drum and cymbal work than for anything interpretive the tenor sax ventures.
A-/B+
JAN GARBAREK GROUP, Dresden—Those who consider themselves avid consumers of Euro-schlock ought to appreciate this two-CD live set, recorded in 2007. I had associated the ECM label with discriminating taste, but it turned out not to be the case here. Garbarek, a saxophonist who grew up in
Norway, was once a disciple of avant-garde jazz artists like Albert Ayler, but he has long since left that behind in favor of “beautiful” sound, which has made him, apparently, the label’s biggest seller, even surpassing Keith Jarrett. To call his music “ambient jazz” is apt yet also misleading in two ways. For one thing, it is questionable whether this is truly jazz—much of it does not swing, and the improvisations typically play it safe. For another, the word “ambient” connotes wallpaper music. Garbarek at least deserves more credit than that: there is too much going on for it to be mere mood music, as well as a real stab at dramatic sweep and tension in some passages. “Soft rock,” New Age, or “smooth jazz” might better serve to categorize
Dresden. Think in terms of the sax counterpart to Jan Hammer. The compositions are mostly Garbarek’s own, although each of his sidemen (Rainer Brüninghaus on keyboards; Yuri Daniel on bass guitar; Manu Katché on drums) gets one original solo turn. These solo ventures do not contribute much: Daniel’s “Tao” is unassuming enough that it could be mistaken for a coda to “Rondo Amoroso,” though it picks up in intensity toward the close; Brüninghaus’s “Transformations” aims higher, dissolving some dreamy arpeggios and other pretty piano figurations into more percussive but no less revelatory arpeggiations, eventually morphing into stride piano and ending with a burst of left-hand (low-note) banging, a taste of cacophony to shake the listener out of a stupor; Katché’s “Grooving Out!” is, well, a drum solo. Garbarek’s own creative output lacks the spark of life, rarely rising above movie-soundtrack-quality material. (He has, naturally, done soundtracks in his career.) “Voy Cantando” (I Go Singing), for instance, which concludes the second disc, begins with a piano figuration that sounds filched from Joaquín Rodrigo’s
Concierto de Aranjuez before launching into a bland and utterly conventional melody. At least this piece allows the players unusual space to embellish the theme, which almost rescues it from itself. The strangely named “The Reluctant Saxophonist” (not so!) is another work in which inspired tinkering by Brüninghaus on piano surpasses the main theme. “Fugl” is denatured Gershwin (“Summertime”), while “Heitor” and “Maracuja” want for the vibrancy of the real Brazilian music that presumably inspired them. “The Tall Tear Trees” begins promisingly with a note-bending tenor sax drone lasting for about two minutes and then surrenders to a plebeian melody. The recording engineers for this
Dresden concert miked Garbarek’s instrument so it would have an echoey reverb; especially when he is on soprano sax, comparisons to the lugubrious Kenny G. are hard to avoid. On “Nu Bein’” (a play on ‘Nubian’), he switches to the
selje flute, a Norwegian folk instrument, for a time and goes all modal on us while letting the rhythm section step into the spotlight. The songs written by outsiders at least have the virtue of not being Garbarek compositions. “Paper Nut,” from 1984, by the Tamil violinist Lakshminarayanan Shankar, who is now going by “Shenkar,” is sufficiently gripping at the outset of the first disc—an energetic and plaintive soprano sax theme over a forebodingly tremulous rhythm section—to raise expectations unreasonably about what is to follow. The other bookend of disc one is
Milton Nascimento and Fernando Brant’s 1974 “Milagre dos Peixes” (Miracle of the Fishes), which, though lacking the immediacy of the original, gets an extended (more than twelve minutes) and generally respectful treatment, even if Garbarek’s tenor sax becomes excessively florid near the end. “Rondo Amoroso,” a piano piece by the minor Norwegian composer Harald Sæverud arranged by Garbarek for his quartet, is approached perhaps too decorously. Even the crowd applause appended to the last tracks of each disc is irritatingly excessive: the clapping after “Nu Bein’” (the last pre-encore piece) lasts two minutes. Enough already!
B-/C+
JASON LINDNER, Jason Lindner Gives You Now vs Now—Though disappointing overall, this disc shows at least on one track (“
Seven Ways”) the sublime heights pianist/keyboardist Jason Lindner is capable of reaching. Now vs Now, his current band, features
Athens native Panagiotis Andreou, who has toured with Yerba Buena (see the CuCu Diamantes entry, in the Latin section above), on bass guitar and vocals and Florham Park, N.J., native Mark Guiliana, who has played with bassist Avishai Cohen, on the drum kit. Though there are jazz elements to the CD, it is nonetheless tricky to justify its placement in the jazz section of the survey; I do so as a matter of convenience because Lindner and the musicians around him are known as jazz cats, and their music is classified accordingly in record stores. Lindner, recording on
Anat Cohen’s Anzic Records
label with rapper/neo-soul artist Meshell Ndegeocello as producer and contributor, appears to be aiming for a fusion of West Coast cool with an
East Coast hip-hop sensibility, yielding mixed results skewed toward the infelicitous. He wrote all the music except for the inoffensive “New Jersey Ballad” (that was Guiliana’s). Unsurprisingly, for those who know my predilections, I could live without the “poetry” stylings of rapper Baba (né Baruch)
Israel, which infect four of the record’s ten tracks. (In reality, his presence is less ubiquitous because the opening two tracks are less than two minutes long each, and “Far” is mostly instrumental.) “Subterranean Train-Travelin’,”
Israel’s biggest showcase, pays homage, consciously or unconsciously, to “Watch the Closing Doors” by IRT (Interboro Rhythm Team) from the early 1980s, as it describes a subway journey downtown from
Bedford Park Boulevard in the northwest
Bronx.
Israel’s observations are mundane rather than insightful, and, as with so many hip-hop tunes, the music amounts to little more than a repeating bass groove, although briefly at the outset and for a half-minute or so at the end, the bass gets loud and aggressive and a synthesizer adds to the cacophony reflecting the rapper’s confusion about where he is headed. Ndegeocello’s participation is less objectionable: she limits herself to vocalizing on one track and playing bass guitar on another. “Worrisome,” the song on which she doubles Panagiotis as bassist, is “worrisome” primarily insofar as, in striving to be a soulful, mellow electric keyboard ballad, it comes off as flaccid and uninspired. The piece’s midsection has a funky dialogue between the two basses, a bit of spice to savor amid the blandness. On the rhythmically off-kilter “Big Pump,” with Lindner’s Moog synthesizer throbbing in heartbeat pattern, Ndegeocello utters just a couple of phrases; later, Andreou scats, following a spacy and wild synth improvisation. “Ahimsa,” named for the Buddhist/Hindu concept of nonviolence, samples at both its beginning and end a speech by
Arun Gandhi, the outspoken and sometimes controversial grandson of the Mahatma. The composition itself is insipid, but it does bring together an impressive group of
New York downtown musicians: Anat Cohen on tenor sax and
pandeiro, her brother Avishai (“the other Avishai Cohen”) on trumpet, and Kurt Rosenwinkel on electric guitar. Rosenwinkel’s solo goes some way to liven things up, and the horns backing Lindner sound great; if only they were working with better source material. “Far,” the lengthiest composition on the disc, has a little bit of everything: it starts with
Israel rapping a couple of stanzas’ worth of verse to Lindner’s melodica, succeeded by some incantatory singing from Cuban-born Pedrito Martínez (who also plays congas), sounding remarkably akin to Baaba Maal (see above, in the pop music section). Then comes a trumpet solo from Avishai Cohen (not actually credited in the CD liner notes) that ends in a brief rock chorus (synthesizer and bass), graced with a bit more spoken word from Frances Velasquez Guevara. Following a brief pause, Cohen’s solo continues, intertwined with some seventies-groovy electric organ figurations by Lindner. Three-quarters of the way through the piece, that rockin’ Moog and the bass guitar return, sounding for all the world like a prog rock anthem from four decades ago. Of the smooth balladlike compositions on the record, the best and most sophisticated is “Friendship and Love (aka Pretty Three).” As its name suggests, it has a pretty theme but avoids banality; eventually, Andreou sings (in Greek?) over Lindner’s playing. Ultimately, it gets stuck in a piano motif that repeats itself and modulates, fairly pointlessly, to end the song. “
Seven Ways,” the gem of the record, kicks off with a harmonically inventive Latin electric piano vamp that welcomes in the dreamy sighing of
Chilean-born Claudia Acuña, a frequent vocal collaborator of Lindner’s; Yosvany Terry, another downtown performer, wields the
chekere (shaker) for additional Latin flavor. What comes next is an out-of-this-world cosmic exchange between Lindner on keys and Avishai Cohen’s trumpet; the groove then settles back down to bring the work to a satisfying conclusion. The three compositions sitting at the heart of this record (“
Seven Ways,” “Friendship and Love,” “Far”) could have formed the basis for a much better CD than this one, alas.
B/B-
MEDESKI MARTIN & WOOD, Radiolarians III—I came late to this party since I am missing
Radiolarians I and
II. Medeski Martin & Wood has been around much longer than the year or so it took to do the Radiolarians series, though. The trio coalesced in 1991 and has been prolific since, releasing albums at a rate of around one per year since. Its music sits squarely at the intersection of jazz and more mainstream funk and rhythm and blues. Some refer to it as “avant-groove.” The rhythmic sensibility is decidedly that of rock rather than swing: phrases tend to be played straight up, and the beat in some songs is as heavy as that of any metal band. But the structure is more like conventional jazz, with theme-improvisation-theme the characteristic line of pursuit. The improvisations really are the heart of the music, which helps to explain why Medeski Martin & Wood has been comfortable appearing in the company of pop-oriented jam bands. The group has also played and recorded with guitarist John Scofield (see the jazz section of the 2007 music survey). Although the trio’s name suggests an equal partnership, it centers on keyboard player John Medeski; the experimentation and flexibility on the disc are largely his. The others—Chris Wood on acoustic double bass and bass guitar, Billy Martin on drums and percussion—might argue the point, but they for most part serve as Medeski’s rhythm section. At the end of the last piece on
Radiolarians III, “Gwyra Mi,” Martin finally grabs the obligatory drum solo. Medeski plays piano but also the
Hammond organ and vintage synthesizers like the
clavinet and the
Mellotron. The demeanor of
Radiolarians III (the series is named for a phylum of marine protozoans studied by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose drawings appear on the CD cover) is kept light—but not lightweight—and playful throughout, even in the darker-sounding passages, and the band’s fusion is accessible and ingratiating without compromising its artistic integrity. All the compositions are original except for “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down,” a brief reworking of an old folk-gospel tune, and the rhythmically
cumbia-like “Gwyra Mi,” written by a man whose name is given as “Potygua Timoteo da Silva Vera” but who appears elsewhere (unless this is a bizarre case of mistaken identity) as Timóteo da Silva Verá
Popyguá, an indigenous Guaraní village leader (and composer/ethnomusicologist?) from São Paulo state in Brazil. The songs with the hardest-driving rock sound are grouped in the middle of the disc. “Undone,” with its heavy drumbeat, grungy bass guitar, and keening synths, would fit right in on a record by Galactic or Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. The succeeding piece, “Wonton,” goes all in for seventies-flavored funk, with the organ pivoting, rollicking, cascading through complex passages to land on yet another
flashy tremolo. The other tracks are softer: “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” begins with a spry and virtuosic piano cadenza from Medeski, who then settles back into an unaccustomed role accompanying the traditional melody as played by Wood on a fuzz-toned slide guitar. “
Kota,” the longest piece on the record, is a relaxed groove whose exoticism is fed by the metallic sound Wood gets from plucking his strings as well as the minor-mode atmospherics created by Medeski, who periodically interrupts the mood of cosmic tranquility with some thunderous piano runs that find faint echo in Wood’s guitar. “Walk Back” bounces along on its dotted-note rhythms as it dissects and reconstructs a circular, Henry Mancini-esque theme. Periodically, it lands on a more static passage in which the beat is steadier and more thumping, the electric keyboards thrumming and reverberating and sounding harmonica-like at the upper end. On “Jean’s Scene,” a paint-by-numbers Latin piano vamp is rescued by some inventive and loose-limbed soloing from Medeski, once he finally frees himself from the theme’s mooring. “Broken Mirror” is an intriguingly odd mixture of tinny-sounding saloon piano and much more limpid chords and runs, set against sustained synth tones, worthy of heavy Muzak rotation, which brighten up the cartoon-sinister tone of the piece.
A
STEVE LEHMAN OCTET, Travail, Transformation, and Flow—This recording, as has been widely noted, makes use of “spectral harmony,” which focuses on overtones and the decay (fading away) of sound waves, isolated and enhanced by computer software. The result is chiming and shimmery, certainly unconventional for jazz and not to everyone’s taste but brilliant in its peculiar way. Even the octet format (alto sax, tenor sax, trumpet, trombone, tuba, vibraphone, double bass, and percussion) itself is unusual. Although Steve Lehman is a saxophone player, on much of the record the instrument that seems to weigh heaviest is the vibraphone, played by Chris Dingman, because of its natural resonance. The more static portions of the album, in which the vibraphone is predominant, put me in mind of the experimental music of trombonist
Grachan Moncur III from the mid-1960s: glacial pacing, ringing chords punctuated by the occasional drum roll, mournful long notes from the low brass—jazz as if suspended in a colloidal solution or gelatin. In fact, there is a swifter and steadier flow to
Travail, Transformation, and Flow even in its slower tracks than in the Moncur music I have heard, with the exception of the ironically named “Waves,” which is practically motionless. “Waves” is focused on tingly percussion and the vibraphone, whose sustained tones slowly die away to spasmodic drum attacks. The horns also jointly play long tones as background; there is eventually a solo trumpet producing an oddly strangulated sound and, in the final hundred seconds, some alto sax improvising by Lehman. “Echoes,” the composition most closely allied to “Waves,” aptly reverberates in the vibraphone and reiterates notes tongued legato in the horns, but the piece is more active, with greater fluidity. The very brief “Dub” consists entirely of vibraphone tones struck singly, sometimes to horn-supplied “resonance,” set to a rapid drum pattern. Most of the tracks are short by jazz standards, but “Alloy” goes on for more than ten minutes, constituting a quarter of the record. It begins with a trombone solo (Tim Albright) before the other horns join in, playing largely in unison or closely shadowing one another (group improvisation), with backdrop furnished by vibe chords and drums. Modernistic and atonal in quality, it is nonetheless closer to the classic jazz of the 1960s or 1970s in its wind/brass ensemble sound. It finishes up with a minute’s worth of the trumpeter (Jonathan Finlayson) and alto saxophonist (Lehman) chasing each other up and down the register and then doubling each other’s part, as all other players drop away. The heavily syncopated “Rudreshm,” presumably a tribute to saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (see the 2008 music survey), with whom Lehman has performed, allows for somewhat greater cacophony, as the sax and trumpet solos seem to work at cross-purposes to the regular but rhythmically off-kilter progression of tones the rest of the band is playing. The tuba of José Dávila is subtly brought forward for “No Neighborhood Rough Enough,”; meanwhile, solos are taken in succession by the alto and tenor saxes and trumpet. While they are each improvising (again, atonally), the other horns match the vibraphone with acrid held notes. The CD ends with the one track not composed by Lehman, a cover of “Living in the World Today” by GZA, a.k.a. Gary Grice, a.k.a. “Genius,” one of the founders of the Wu-Tang Clan, from his
Liquid Swords (1995) album. The octet takes the horn charts and repeating keyboard pattern (transcribed for vibes) and uses them as a foundation for a freewheeling and noisy competition between the alto and tenor (Mark Shim) saxes, their agitated runs collapsing into squawks. Still in his early thirties, Lehman has led or co-led various lineups, including Fieldwork with Vijay Iyer (see below), already. This first outing by his octet has piqued my interest to hear more.
A
VIJAY IYER TRIO, Historicity—With degrees from Yale and
Berkeley (in math and physics, no less), pianist Vijay Iyer is one of the most cerebral jazz composers/performers. One might expect his music to be formidable and intimidating (some of his compositional technique derives from mathematical formulas or physical properties); in fact, it is conceptual, abstract, and sometimes knotty but not lacking for warmth or approachability.
Historicity, as the title suggests, mostly looks back to older works even as it tries to carry them forward by engaging a dialogue between past and present, placing them “in the stream of history,” as Iyer writes. Just two compositions are new: the title track, which kicks off the CD, and “Helix.” “Historicity” is one of those pieces that makes you wonder whether your mind is big enough to process what Iyer is expressing, in a restless song with an astringent, elusive theme that eschews melodic hooks, a work that obsessively cycles through certain figurations, and tests the plasticity of its own rhythms in the coda section. Iyer’s playing is fluid throughout, and his rhythm section of Marcus Gilmore on drums and Stephan Crump on bass gamely keeps up with him. “Helix,” a shorter, slower piece, is likewise thematically rangy and abstruse, and it also bends its time signatures as it progresses, but the improvisation section seems to sneak in variations on one of the simplest songs from childhood: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The last two tracks on the CD reimagine earlier work by Iyer himself. “Trident: 2010” overhauls “Trident: 2001,” from the record
Panoptic Modes (2001); I am not familiar with the original, but the primary theme of “Trident” is readily graspable and remains with the listener even as Iyer twists it into innumerable strands of multicolored taffy over the course of nine minutes. “Segment for Sentiment #2,” from his first album,
Memorophilia (1996), lets Crump introduce the melody and remains a placid conversation between equals, piano and bass, until Iyer’s forceful restatement of the theme at the close. Of the six covers on
Historicity, I am reluctant to admit that my favorite is M.I.A.’s “Galang.” Iyer’s “
Trio Riot Version” of this hip-hop tune with a bouncy beat from M.I.A.’s first record,
Arular (2005), is a spirited two-and-a-half-minute romp, all the better for having done away with the pop star’s insufferable, preening raps. Iyer doubtless feels some distant kinship with M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam): both are ethnic Tamils who grew up in the West; M.I.A. is the youngest “contributor” to the record but, at 34 years old, just four years younger than Iyer. “Dogon A.D.,” from the debut album (1972) of the same name by Julius Hemphill (who would a few years later found the World Saxophone Quartet), builds an intricate superstructure off the simple lattice of a slinky three-note groove, voiced by a growling bass. Iyer, substituting piano for sax, fires off dire-sounding trills and splay-fingered runs but always remains rhythmically bound by that same bass groove. Ronnie Foster’s “Mystic Brew,” from
The Two Headed Freap (1972), provides another platform for Iyer’s virtuosity. Pleasing as the cover version is, it lacks the visceral mellow cool of the soul-jazz original, performed by Foster on organ. Closer to the spirit of the original is “
Smoke Stack,” though free jazz pianist/composer Andrew Hill’s playing on the 1963 LP
Smokestack comes off as more taut and forceful without being any less fluent than Iyer’s glib pyrotechnics. Not coincidentally, the drummer on Hill’s record,
Roy Haynes, is the grandfather of Iyer’s own percussionist, Gilmore, who has his one extended solo three-quarters of the way through. The trio has fun rolling the beat with Stevie Wonder’s “Big Brother,” which Iyer categorizes in the CD booklet as “disruptive”; my own sense is that the original, from the influential record
Talking Book (1972), is trifling compared to some of the other material on the same disc, which featured “Superstition” and “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” For
Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere,” from the musical
West Side Story (1957), Iyer retains the melody but fractures the rhythm and introduces a walking bass line. His improvisations at first threaten to fly off on a tangent of descending-scale chords and roiling arpeggios, but he finds a clever way to bring them back into harmonic relation to the song, playing with assurance and conviction.
A/A-
MIGUEL ZENÓN, Esta Plena—Zenón, an up and coming jazz saxophonist, won a Guggenheim Foundation grant to compose music based on the
plena, a folkloric style of music prevalent in his native
Puerto Rico. The rhythm of the
plena is driven by a handheld frame drum called the
pandero that resembles a tambourine. The
pandero comes in several sizes, primarily the small
requinto and the larger
seguidor, though there is an intermediate type called the
segundo. Plena developed in the southern coastal city of
Ponce and then spread west to Mayagüez and north to
San Juan. For
Esta Plena, Zenón, who has played with the late
Ray Barretto, as well as David Sánchez, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and Guillermo Klein’s Los Guachos (see the 2008 music survey), added a
plena trio to his usual lineup of Luis Perdomo on piano, Hans Glawischnig on acoustic bass, and Henry Cole on drums. Five of the ten compositions, all original, are instrumentals, and the rest carry lyrics. In the latter, the
plena conjunto is front and center, with Héctor “Tito” Matos on lead vocals and
requinto, Obanilú Allende on backing vocals and
segundo, and Juan Gutiérrez on backing vocals and
seguidor. The melding of the two bands ought to be as seamless as any Latin jazz or jazz-rock fusion, yet the requisite catalyst is absent, meaning that the contrasting styles appear to have little to say to each other. This is most evident on the title track, a homily to the music itself: it begins with one minute’s worth of lively
plena singing and drumming and ends with another ninety seconds or so of recapitulation. In between, momentum slackens considerably as Perdomo and Zenón engage in duo improvisation that is fine on its own but might as well be from a different tune; only in the song’s final twenty seconds is there a true synthesis between Perdomo’s piano line and the
plena theme. Elsewhere (“Óyelo” [Listen] and “Pandero y Pagode”), the lack of chemistry is compounded by melodies that are the musical equivalent of overcooked, mushy plantains—to be fair, “Pandero y Pagode” (
pagode is a subtype of samba music from
Brazil) has a tangy piano accompaniment to its sappy theme, and Perdomo’s and Zenón’s solo improvisations do speak to that theme, making it considerably more palatable. Zenón says in the press release that accompanied the album’s debut that “it was all about the
panderos,” but on the tracks with no singing, it is mostly
not about the
panderos (you do hear them backing the bass and sax on “Calle Calma” [
Quiet Street]). Although I enjoy the agile and challenging, tightly syncopated and concise instrumental “Residencial Llorens Torres” (named for a
San Juan public housing project), the album hits its stride only two-thirds of the way through, with “Villa Coope,” “¿Qué Será de Puerto Rico?” (What Will Become of
Puerto Rico?), and “Progreso” in succession. “Villa Coope” begins with a louche-sounding saxophone intro but takes on an astringent quality as the piano enters; the counterpoint between Perdomo’s and the wind player’s lines makes for some of Zenón’s best writing on the disc. “Progreso,” another lengthy instrumental, has a broad sweep and classical elegance to its piano melody that puts me in mind of some of
Chucho Valdés’s most inspired work with the jazz-
son fusion band Irakere in the 1970s; Glawischnig gets lots of room to solo on bass in the middle of the piece. Quite different in character is “¿Qué Será de Puerto Rico?” in which Matos, the featured vocalist, takes on the Rubén Blades (see above, in the Latin section) role of national Cassandra: if not as politically pointed as a typical Blades number, there is still plenty of hand-wringing over the state of the economy and the moral fiber of
Puerto Rican society. Matos’s manner of singing likewise approaches that of the Panamanian star. Plus, Henry Cole gets his one serious percussion solo on the CD on this track. The record concludes with a New Year’s song, “Despedida” (Goodbye), saying farewell to the old year, as “Auld Lang Syne” is jazzed up, giving way to a breathless new theme that sounds too hurried for its own good—high-spirited but sounding like something dashed off on the run—before returning at the very end.
B+
CLASSICAL
As is customary, I will not actually venture to assign grades or critique extensively the classical recordings, an exercise best left to those with the musical vocabulary and training needed for it. I picked up nine recordings that were 2009 releases.
ALARM WILL SOUND, A/rhythmia—With selections ranging from the fourteenth-century Johannes Ciconia to au courant electronica tinkerers Mochipet and Autechre, the lineup on
A/rhythmia is certainly eclectic. What unites them is the concept of arrhythmia, the lack of a regular rhythm or pulse. As the Ciconia piece,
Le Ray Au Soleyl, demonstrates, the notion of messing around with rhythms began very early. In this otherwise medieval-sounding vocal piece (sung by
Alarm Will Sound musicians Courtney Orlando and Caleb Burhans), three voices (either one singer’s voice was looped or there is an uncredited singer here) chant the same melody simultaneously at three different speeds. The Agnus Dei II from Josquin des Prez’s mass
Missa L’Homme Armé super Voces Musicales from the late fifteenth century is also meant for accompanied voices but here is given a purely instrumental treatment that starts off sounding like a traditional wind ensemble but is then given a startlingly loud electronic overlay. From Autechre (Rob Brown and Sean Booth), the group chose “Cfern” from the album
Confield (2001); this track takes one loose-limbed theme and gradually adds spacing internally, protracting it and slowing it down, then reversing the process to return eventually to something like the original—a game of rhythmic funhouse mirrors. “
Breakcore” specialist Mochipet (the
Taiwan-born David Wang) samples an Arabic melody and subjects to various rhythmic tweaks and cartoonish electronic effects on “Dessert Search for Techno Baklava” (2002), ending with a spell of intensely muscular drumming. Even more clownish in their way are the five entries from Benedict Mason’s
Animals and the Origins of Dance (1992). Mason, who started his career as a filmmaker, wrote a set of twelve and intended them to be performed together, but here just five are dispersed amid the other pieces. The CD booklet says that “each [is] precisely ninety seconds long,” although that is evidently not precisely the case on this recording. In any event, they are playful, densely intricate, and rhythmically jumbled, and one would have to have been born without a sense of humor not to appreciate a title like “Disgraceful Bossanova with Lemurs.” Composers of greater
renown are here as well.
Harrison Birtwistle’s
Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum (1978), one of the longer works on the CD, is also the most strictly modernist (Birtwistle is an Igor Stravinsky disciple, with elements of Olivier Messaien making their presence felt as well). If this is a perpetual motion machine, it is one of the most irregular ever attempted. György Ligeti is represented by his “Movimiento Preciso e
Meccanico,” from the Chamber Concerto (1969-70), which depicts the cacophony caused by a collection of clocks each ticking out its own beat independent of the others. Conlon Nancarrow came back into fashion in the final years of his life (he died in 1997), in part because of the advocacy of Ligeti. The group performs two of his player-piano compositions here. Study No. 6 for Player Piano (c. 1950) discombobulates a Spanish melody by giving it a bass line (played with the left hand on piano) that switches off constantly between two independent rhythms, making the piece lope along like a palsied horse. Study No. 3A for Player Piano, from Nancarrow’s
Boogie-Woogie Suite (1948), which brings the disc to a close, starts with a swingy twelve-bar blues and then veers off into all manner of rhythmic and thematic variations, all the while retaining that same rollicking boogie-woogie piano line, no matter how much it clashes with whatever else is being played (which is the case to an extreme midway through the piece).
Michael Gordon’s rock-heavy
Yo Shakespeare (1992) returns, to a degree, to Ciconia’s idea: it has two groups playing the same rhythm but one at two-thirds the speed, creating an out-of-phase effect. This is later complicated by a third group of musicians (more likely, looping the same musicians) playing six-note phrases at an entirely different tempo. Clearly, Gordon was swayed by the minimalist experiments of Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but, as a former rock band keyboard player, he had more maximalist influences feeding into this loud and aggressive piece as well. Gordon’s presence here reflects the
Bang on a Can hip sensibility with which
Alarm Will Sound is often associated: Gordon was a co-founder of the Bang on a Can festival/project.
Alarm Will Sound is a chamber group of twenty musicians who originally met at the
Eastman School of Music in
Rochester and is directed and conducted by
Alan Pierson.
CHEN YI, Sound of the Five (Third Angle New Music Ensemble)—Chen Yi, who is a violinist as well as composer, was part of the first generation allowed to attend the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing after its reopening in 1977, following the Cultural Revolution, along with Tan Dun and Zhou Long, who would become Chen’s husband. Like Tan and Bright Sheng, who was part of the same generation but attended the
Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Chen since leaving
China in the mid-1980s has incorporated both Western and Eastern influences into her music.
The Sound of the Five is a CD containing six compositions, five of which were inspired in some way by Chinese source material. But all use Western instruments exclusively, with the exception of some
Asian percussion in
Yangko. The music is performed by the
Portland, Oregon-based Third Angle New Music Ensemble, a six-member group consisting of three string players, two woodwinds, and a pianist, plus invited guests. The lone piece that is
independent of overt
Asian influence is
Burning (2002), a short work commissioned in response to the September 11 terror attacks. From the start, violin glissandos approximate the high-pitched whistling/shrieking heard when fierce
flames are devouring organic material. It is a restless piece, anguished and unsettling, its impact visceral rather than deep. At the opposite end of the spectrum in thematic terms is
Tibetan Tunes (2007), two songs derived from actual
Tibetan folk melodies, one a tranquil tribute to a goddess, the other a sprightly, delicate pentatonic-scale dance. A piano trio substitutes for the traditional
Tibetan instruments, a bamboo flute, a six-string lute, and and upright fiddle related to the Chinese
erhu. Happy Rain on a Spring Night (2004), scored for violin, cello, clarinet, flute, and piano, hews closely over the course of its eleven minutes to the eight lines of verse in a Tang Dynasty poem of the same name by Tu Fu. Its three sections are by turns fluttery and anticipatory, calmer yet still tightly wound (making use of pitch contrasts between the cello and the flute and plinking high notes on the keyboard), and greatly exercised, marking the full ensemble’s gradual release of tension via skittering runs, trills, and abrupt attacks that illustrate the “blossoming” stage of the poem.
Yangko (2000/2004) began life as a movement from Chen’s
Chinese Folk Dance Suite for violin and orchestra and was later rescored as a piece for solo violin and percussion. The percussionists not only whack a variety of objects—
Asian woodblocks, gongs, and cymbals—but also vocalize staccato syllables, some no more than whispers. The violin’s part, drawing on traditional music from northeastern
China, is tuneful and responsive to the agile, dancing percussion but eventually takes off into the stratosphere of pitch, Sarasate-style (his famed
Carmen Fantasy), heading toward dog-whistle territory.
Sprout (1982/1986) was likewise reworked, from student composition to movement from a string quartet to stand-alone quartet composition. Despite being the only work on the disc that originated when the composer was still studying in
China, it wears its “Asian-ness” lightly: it is a sedate chamber piece with a flash of liveliness in the middle that easily could have been a medieval French peasant dance. Hiding its Chinese roots even more deeply is “Lusheng Ensemble,” the first movement of the album’s four-part title composition, an edgy and strikingly modernist piece. When I first heard “Lusheng Ensemble,” directly after the Iannis Xenakis string quartets (see below), it seemed to be of a piece with those compositions. In fact, the music aims to represent the bamboo mouth organ used by some ethnic minority groups of southwestern
China. The second movement of
Sound of the Five (1998), “Echoes of the Set Bells,” cleverly reproduces with only strings the sonorities and harmonics of the
bianzhong chimes suspended on long frames that were used in Chinese and
Korean courtly and ritual music. The third movement, “Romance of Hsiao and Ch’in,” emphasizes the harmony between two traditional instruments, the vertical flute (
hsiao or
xiao) and the seven-string zither (
ch’in or
qin). The final movement, “
Flower Drums in Dance,” is far more hectic, tempestuous, and kinetic in
temperament than the rest. The “five” in the title refers to the scoring of the composition, for string quartet plus solo cello (here played by
Hamilton Cheifetz of Third Angle New Music Ensemble).
EGBERTO GISMONTI, Saudações—Classically trained as a pianist, composer, and arranger—having studied with the late great Nadia Boulanger in
Paris—Egberto Gismonti learned guitar after returning to his native
Brazil. He is incredibly prolific, releasing dozens of recordings since his first in 1969, in addition to performing on, producing, and arranging others.
Saudações (Greetings) is a 2-CD set that pairs two radically different works. The first,
Sertões Veredas—Tributo a Miscigenação (this translates as Sertão [Scrubland] Trails—Tribute to Miscegenation, the title taken from a 1956 novel by João Guimarães Rosa,
Grande Sertão: Veredas, which also gave its name to a national park now shared between Minas Gerais and Bahia states in Brazil), is a seven-movement piece for chamber string orchestra. We tend to think of “miscegenation” as interracial (particularly black-white) cohabitation, but Gismonti has a broader concept in mind: the intermingling of European and native
South American cultures. In this seventy-minute composition, he pays homage to Bach, Beethoven,
Vivaldi,
Mozart, French Impressionist music, and Penderecki while also offering tribute to the masters of
Brazilian modernism: Heitor Villa-Lobos, Oscar Niemeyer (in architecture), the Cinema Novo filmmakers of the 1950s/1960s. The various movements are meant to call up images of train travel across the country, European colonialists mistreating slaves, a journey to the
Amazon basin tribes that make their home along the
Xingu River, a horse-drawn cart, the circus, a children’s game. (These ideas are described in the CD liner notes by Lilian Dias from her interviews with the composer, written in Portuguese and then ineptly translated into English.) But the music is impressionistic rather than programmatic; for example, in the absence of percussion, there is no audible crack to represent the whip being applied to slaves—no one strikes a bow frame against the body of a cello. In these regards, it bears some resemblance to Villa-Lobos’s compositions. Only the final movement, which is also the sole movement for which Gismonti had a co-composer,
Geraldo E. Carneiro, bears a name as well as a number: “Palhaço na Caravela” (Clown in the Caravel). Whereas the others are generally atonal (the sixth movement, the circus piece, mixes in some consonance), “Palhaço na Caravela” becomes sweetly tuneful, in accordance with its depiction of a game played by Amerindian children. The suite is performed by the
Havana-based, all-female chamber string ensemble
Camerata Romeu, conducted by Zenaida Romeu. The second disc, Guitar Duets, consists of ten typically shorter pieces, played by Gismonti and his son, Alexandre Gismonti. (From the photo, it appears that Alexandre plays the standard six-string acoustic, while his father plays a ten-string instrument.) My sense, fairly or not, is that Egberto Gismonti is more in his element writing for guitar; not that
Sertões Veredas lacks for spiritedness when called for, but if he is searching for a quintessentially Brazilian mode of “classical” expression, he has not succeeded in what eluded even Villa-Lobos’s grasp. The guitar writing, shorn of any presumed pretensions, is liveler and more electric. Alexandre Gismonti wrote one of the pieces, “Chora Antônio,” while the aforementioned Carneiro collaborated on “Palhaço” and
Paulo C. Pinheiro on “Saudações.” The playing is effervescent; the rhythmic irregularities handled deftly in “Lundú,” “Dois Violões” (Two Guitars), and elsewhere. It is evident that father and son have been performing together for some time. “Dança dos Ecravos” (
Slave Dance) is like a catalog of guitar techniques, from
sul ponticello playing to “string squeak” as the fingers slide along the fretboard to tapping on the sound board for a percussive effect. Tremolos, creaks, and unusual popping sounds characterize the rapid fingerwork of “Águas & Dança” (Waters and Dance). The guitarists sound most classically Spanish on “Mestiço & Caboclo” (two terms for mixed-race
European-Amerindian people) and “Carmen.” The final piece, “Saudações,” seems to reference the
Brazilian pop standard “Doralice” (1945) by Dorival Caymmi.
AUGUSTIN HADELICH (violin),
Flying Solo—I am contemptuous of the practice of giving classical recordings pop-idol titles like
Flying Solo (and what is up with the heart-and-crossbones decal on Hadelich’s violin case photographed on the back cover of the CD booklet, as he reclines barefoot with his instrument?); at the same time, it is hard to begrudge the classical music industry any marketing trick it feels will sell albums in a distinctly unpromising environment.
Nevertheless, Hadelich, a promising violin soloist in his mid-twenties, born in
Italy to German parents and now living in
New York, deserves serious attention.
Flying Solo, his third recording and first on the AVIE label, whose business model allows musicians to retain creative control of their own work, is not an album of puff pieces. Almost half is taken up by Béla Bartók’s craggy Sonata for Solo Violin (1944), written toward the end of the composer’s life on commission from Yehudi Menuhin (who had to prevail upon him to tone down a few of the more difficult passages). The sonata looks back to Johann Sebastian Bach, even as it points the way forward with technical and coloristic innovations, such as quarter tones and simultaneous bowing and pizzicato. It is in four movements: the first, in Tempo di ciaccona, pays homage to the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 for solo violin while engaging in its own
temperamentally intense passagework. The second-movement fugue deftly demonstrates how a single instrument can be made to sound as though it were several distinct voices. This is followed by a bittersweet lament that lives up to its designation as Melodia: adagio. The final movement, marked Presto, begins with about a minute of beelike buzzing before the primary theme kicks in, lovely in its astringency and impressively agile. Following the Bartók, Hadelich settles back with several Caprices by the violin virtuoso
Nicolò Paganini, three of the twenty-four he wrote between 1802 and 1817, taking inspiration from a similar set by Pietro Locatelli.
Caprice No. 4 in C Minor is the longest, most complex, and most emotionally fraught, returning to its original lively theme after venturing far afield. By contrast No. 9 in E major is a pleasant bagatelle, and No. 21 in A Major is lyrical and often compared to an opera aria. Two of the six sonatas for solo violin by the Belgian violinist/composer Eugène Ysaÿe, written in 1923, succeed the Paganini Caprices on the disc. Sonata No. 3 in one movement renders homage to the Romanian composer and violinst George Enescu and his style; it contains some fiercely difficult-sounding passages despite its being called “Ballade.” Yet, Hadelich says that these fingerings and bowings flow naturally from Ysaÿe’s habit of composing with the instrument directly at hand. Sonata No. 5, dedicated to violinist Mathieu Crickboom, is in two movements. The first, titled “L’aurore [the Dawn]: Lento assai,” is a tone poem in miniature, and the second is an earthy but
delicate-stepping “Danse rustique.” Hadelich concludes the disc with the three-movement Sonata for Solo Violin of Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1951), based on twelve-tone rows. The entire composition piques anxiety through its edgy modernistic sound; the finale makes a nod to tradition at least in terms of structure by taking the form of a
toccata.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN, Discoveries: Symphony No. 3 “Scottish”; Piano Concerto No. 3 (Roberto Prosseda, piano)
; Overture “The Hebrides” (Gewandhausorchester, conducted by Riccardo Chailly)—The word “discoveries” used for the title of this recording should be taken with a grain of salt. Both the “Scottish” Symphony and the “
Hebrides” Overture are well known and much loved Mendelssohn works, leaving only the unfinished Third Piano Concerto as terra incognita in the repertory. The new twist with respect to the better-known compositions is that the Gewandhaus Orchestra of
Leipzig, under the baton of Riccardo Chailly, is performing earlier versions of both, dug up by enterprising musicologists. The “
London” version of the “Scottish” Symphony was written and performed only a short time before Mendelssohn published the final version in 1842 and differs only in modest degree (a few dozen additional bars of music out of hundreds and some slightly different orchestrations). These differences affect only the rousing first and final movements, not the Adagio or the familiar second-movement Vivace non troppo, with its fleet, cheerful melody, like the clarion call of a hunting party, carried by the winds first, followed by the full orchestra. Separately, functioning as a kind of refrain, the orchestra has chosen to recreate an early sketch (1829/1830) by the composer of the first sixteen bars of the symphony, orchestrated by Christian Voss. The “
Rome” version of the “Hebrides” Overture (1830), also called “Fingal’s Cave,” the one he played a piano version of for Hector Berlioz in
Rome in 1831, was more thoroughly revised for the version that Mendelssohn was at last satisfied to see published in 1832. The piano concerto is problematic because the composer wrote out the solo part for the first two movements with only limited
indications as to how they would be orchestrated (more severely limited in the second than in the first). As for the finale, all that is extant from a manuscript residing in the Bodleian Library at
Oxford University is a handful of measures from the beginning, revealing a few bars of introduction followed by an initial theme. The pianist Roberto Prosseda, who plays on this disc, asked conductor and music scholar Marcello Bufalini to complete the concerto. Many critics will no doubt receive with skepticism—if they do not dismiss it out of hand as meretricious—what they would regard as ersatz Mendelssohn, particularly since the finale is almost entirely Bufalini’s creation. But Bufalini contends that the work is unlikely to be performed as an incomplete, two-movement set. Moreover, he was not undertaking this reconstruction in a vacuum but in full knowledge of Mendelssohn’s compositional style and techniques, derived from his other work of the period (1842-44), notably the famous violin concerto, which, like this piano concerto, was written in the key of
E minor. I say that Bufalini’s reconstruction merits the respect and consideration due a project undertaken with such painstaking care. The finale is plausibly mid-nineteenth-century German Romanticism in
rondo form, with sweeping, light-fingered keyboard runs and a suitably florid cadenza that puts to use of some of Mendelssohn’s manuscript fragments. Naturally, it would be better to have the entire composition in Mendelssohn’s own hand. But the fact is that we do not and probably
never will. This album, issued for the bicentennial of Mendelssohn’s birth and performed live at the Gewandhaus by the very orchestra he once led in
Leipzig, bills all three works as “world premiere recordings.”
SERGEJ RACHMANINOV, Études-Tableaux (opus 39); Variations on a Theme of Corelli (Alexander Romanovsky, piano)—This recording by a young and superbly talented
Russian pianist, Romanovsky’s second for the Decca
label following a disc of Schumann and Brahms works, pairs the last significant composition by Rachmaninov before leaving Russia for good and the one piano piece he wrote following his emigration to the West, after which he concentrated on his lucrative touring as a concert pianist. The
Études-Tableaux, written in 1916-17, was the second such set of “study-pictures,” following the Opus 33 of 1911. Although the composer, upon prompting, suggested ideas to go along with several of the nine études, those might have been an afterthought; the pieces’
essential nature is abstract, not programmatic. They are in varying keys and are generally short, although movements two and seven, marked “lento,” are longer in duration. These two slower movements were referred to by Rachmaninov as “The Sea and Seagulls” (no. 2) and the “Funeral March.” The other two movements for which the composer offered thematic hints were no. 6 (“Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf”) and no. 9 (an “oriental march”). The mood is generally sober, if not somber (all the movements are in minor keys except the last one), though it brightens for the final two études. The
tempestuous opening movement has a tenuous link, suggested by the composer, to an
Arnold Böcklin painting,
At Play in the Waves, and, likewise, the eighth (which manages to project sunniness in spite of its minor-key setting) is tied to a Böcklin painting titled
Morning. The mostly broadly sweeping of the études is no. 5, marked “appassionato”—it jumps out at the listener as classic, heart-on-sleeve Rachmaninov romanticism at work, with just a tantalizing hint of chromaticism toward the close. The following movement, the “Little Red Riding Hood” episode, was originally intended for the first set of
Études-Tableaux and then revised; its thunderous runs and dense passagework pose a pianistic challenge that Romanovsky deftly surmounts. The final “march” movement begins as stern and declamatory before softening; although vivacious and written in the key of D major, there is a touch of steel in it that remains to the very end. The
Variations on a Theme of Corelli, written in 1931 in
France, presents a theme and twenty variations, together with an intermezzo and a coda. All these movements are very brief: the theme itself lasts slightly less than a minute, and the variations range from barely twenty seconds to almost two minutes. The theme was taken from a sonata by the Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli, who himself borrowed a popular and venerable tune of
Iberian origins, “La Folía.” The theme and variations are mostly in the key of D minor, but the pattern is broken with the appearance of the florid, Spanish-sounding, cadenza-like Intermezzo following Variation no. 13. The succeeding two variations are in a heart-rending D-flat major; then, after a transitional variation, the final four revert to the original key. As with the
Études-Tableaux, the slower movements tend to be longer; the allegro variations, such as nos. five through seven, go by in a
flash. Numbers ten through twelve feature big jumps between notes, while the final three variations play around with a rolling rhythmic pattern of a dotted note followed by two eighth-notes. The coda is a slow and plaintive digression—or summation, depending on how one hears it—before it settles back into a quiet recapitulation of the original theme to conclude the composition.
ALFRED SCHNITTKE, Symphony No. 9 (manuscript reconstructed by Alexander Raskatov; Dresdner Philharmonie, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies)
; ALEXANDER RASKATOV, Nunc Dimittis (Elena Vassilieva, mezzo-soprano; the Hilliard Ensemble; Dresdner Philharmonie, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies)—One of the great Russian composers of the second half of the twentieth century, Alfred Schnittke spent his final years in Germany, his paternal homeland. The Ninth Symphony (1997/1998) was the last major composition from his pen; a series of strokes beginning in the 1980s eventually incapacitated him. The symphony’s three movements were written in script that was all but illegible since Schnittke was using his left hand after the paralysis of his right side. The first attempt to reconstruct the piece was made by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, but Schnittke, hearing a tape of the premiere, rejected that version shortly before his death. It then fell to Schnittke’s widow, Irina, to find someone to bring the work to a condition in which it could be performed. She chose Russian-Canadian composer Nikolai Korndorf, but he soon died himself. The difficult task was passed on to Alexander Raskatov, a
Russian composer born in 1953 now living in
Germany. His version, completed in 2006 and presented here in a performance at the Lukaskirche (St. Luke’s Church) in
Dresden by the
Dresden Philharmonic in 2008, has to be considered the authoritative version. As a pendant, the CD contains a vocal/orchestral piece by Raskatov dedicated to the memory of Schnittke,
Nunc Dimittis (2007). Raskatov was at pains to stress that his composition was in no way to be considered a final movement of the Schnittke symphony, though some still interpret it that way. The symphony is atonal but hardly a radical assault on the ears (though Schnittke’s music was radical enough to be denounced by Soviet leaders); it is said that his early work was influenced by Shostakovich, and later in life, following a career devoted to serialism and “
polystylism,” a particularly postmodern approach to composition, he may have returned to his original source of inspiration. The Ninth Symphony comes across as somber but not funereal, austere and yet a grab-bag of orchestral touches and colorations such as isolated wind and horn choruses (the CD booklet compares it to “something seemingly cobbled together randomly from pieces of mosaic”). The opening movement, marked [Andante] (Raskatov was guessing at the tempo
indication, one supposes), has some moments of great activity and energy amid a
sea of more muted string passagework. Toward the end, there are several abrupt brass fanfares, interspersed with a bit of glockenspiel. The second movement, Moderato, does not seem to be taken at a substantially faster tempo than the first. There is a
delicate little exchange between a harpsichord and oboe near the beginning, before the lead trumpet and strings carry the development
further. The final movement is
indicated as Presto, or very fast, but I discern no more than a brisk andante or allegro moderato at best. The energy derives from its Bartokian orchestral
industriousness, not from its pacing. This still leaves momentary gaps exposing a bit of solo clarinet, say, or harpsichord, and the piccolo is of course shrill enough to pierce the massed strings. Like the other movements, the Presto ends quietly and seemingly inconclusively—“and that is all he wrote.” Raskatov’s memorial piece,
Nunc Dimittis, takes its name from a passage in the Gospel of Luke in which Simeon says, “Lord, now dost thou let thy servant depart.” Schnittke, born to a Jewish father, converted to Christianity later in life and became fairly intensely religious. The quasi-monastic vocal sections are set to two short poems, first, Joseph Brodsky’s “Candlemas” and then a five-line invocation from Starets (a term for “wise elder”) Siluan, a
Russian monk at
Mount Athos in
Greece in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century who was made a saint. The orchestral interludes tend to be fairly static, with fluttery winds and pools of tuned percussion, but are punctuated by sudden crescendos to fortissimo and then instantaneous fadeaway. There is an odd vocal passage midway through in which the mezzo’s line repeatedly leaps more than an octave for just one note and then returns to normal. Toward the end, the subtly excellent Hilliard Ensemble takes over, sounding the way I imagine a medieval
Russian chorus would have, with Elena Vassilieva, the soloist, reduced to agitated outbursts of filigree.
TCHAIKOVSKY/RACHMANINOV, Piano Trios (
Lang Lang, piano; Vadim Repin, violin; Mischa Maisky, cello)—These two works, Sergei Rachmaninov’s
Trio Élégiaque No. 1 in G Minor and Piotr Ilytch Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A Minor, are frequently bundled together, in no small part because of the profound influence on Rachmaninov of the older composer. In fact, Rachmaninov’s second piano trio, written a year after the one offered here, followed the death of Tchaikovsky and was dedicated to him. Although both these compositions are termed “piano trios,”
indicating the primacy of the keyboard part, they are close in spirit to a triple sonata, as the violinist, Vadim Repin, and the cellist, Mischa Maisky, are active participants in shaping and developing themes, not mere accompanists to Lang Lang. Rachmaninov’s first “elegiac” trio, not written with anyone particular in mind, is a strikingly mature piece for one who was just nineteen when he created it in 1892. It is a single movement, but with various tempo changes throughout that
essentially subdivide it into a dozen or so sections. It is written in
sonata form, so it contains a single theme that undergoes exposition, development (elaboration), and recapitulation. The opening is marked Lento lugubre, and the final tempo
indication is Alla marcia funebre (funeral march); between these two sections, the pacing is generally more animated. Tchaikovsky’s piano trio is a tribute to his mentor, the pianist and conductor Nikolai Rubinstein, who died in 1881. Written a decade before Rachmaninov’s and set in a similar minor key, it has an odd structure. Its first part, “Pezzo Elegiaco” (Elegiac Piece), is long but fairly standard for the opening movement of a chamber piece. It is
suitably somber, opening with a piercing melody taken up by the cello and violin together and ending with a funeral procession, yet it contains more than a few passages of surprising sunniness as it progresses. This is followed by a theme and variations that leave behind the idea of elegy until the final variation merges into a lengthy coda. The coda is the source of some disagreement in terms of approach: many performers have felt that it is overly long and a bit
flabby and have cut portions. On this CD, it is presented in full. The variations, it has been suggested, represent aspects of Rubinstein’s character and “range in mood from playful to pompous,” according to Steven E. Paul. The tinkly (upper keys on the piano exclusively) fifth variation has been compared to a music box or a sleigh ride, while others are clearly
indicated as dances (waltz,
mazurka) or, in one case, written as a
fugue. The ninth and longest variation is
indicated as “flebile,” or mourning, yet it sits between the sprightly fugue and mazurka. The seventh is declamatory and booming, its stuttering line banged out by the pianist with only grace notes added by the strings. The final variation/coda starts off in a major key, marked Allegro risoluto e con fuoco (resolute and with fire), gradually clouding over in mood as the intensity builds and then abruptly downshifting in tempo to andante, bringing back a restatement of the opening movement’s theme, in its original key. The final bars of the trio,
indicated as “lugubrious,” honor the deceased with one last funeral march.
IANNIS XENAKIS, Complete String Quartets (Tetras; Tetora; ST/4; Ergma) (The JACK Quartet)—For many, listening to the music of Iannis Xenakis would be as pleasurable as hearing fingernails scrape across a chalkboard. For those with a greater capacity to appreciate uncomprisingly modern “serious” music, the JACK Quartet (named for the first initials of the four members) offers the four string quartets of the
Romanian-born, French-naturalized Greek twentieth-century master. Each of the quartets is distinct, and they span a long period in Xenakis’s career: the experiments that led ultimately to
ST/4, his first, began in 1956, when he was still in his mid-thirties. The quartets are presented not in chronological order but in order of diminishing length (the back cover of the CD jacket erroneously switches the times posted for
Tetras and
Tetora).
Tetras, from 1983, is perhaps the most aggressive; it is full of swooping glissandos, anguished trills, groaning strings, creaky-door noises, sawing, bits of pizzicato, percussive sounds made by unconventional bowing or tapping on the instrument frame. Eventually, the violins devote much energy to running up and down scales, but these are not standard scales by any means; there are plenty of irregular intervals as well as chromaticism, not to mention a certain amount of squeaky violin “white noise.” There is no true sense of forward momentum, yet the bowing does
mount to a frenzy near the end before subsiding away.
Tetora (1990; like
Tetras, its name makes reference to the four players in a quartet) is actually the sweetest of the four, relatively speaking, the closest to a classic string quartet, with the foursome bowing in unison or counterpoint. What is odd is the selection of pitch values Xenakis uses; they do not correspond to the diatonic scale, leading to some otherworldly sonorities. To quote from the CD booklet: “[Xenakis] gives prominence, later in the piece . . . to chordal
textures that cycle rhythmically in unpredictable ways around a fixed set of harmonies. The result in such passages is a sense of stasis on a global scale with constant movement on the local scale.” Xenakis’s first quartet,
ST/4 (1962), was distilled from
ST/10, a composition for a larger ensemble that was generated by an algorithm, working with early computer technology at IBM’s French facilities. It is a buzzy, twittery, rhythmless piece with plinks and glissandos like those of
Tetras. Parts of it are reminiscent of the fitful, keening violins and volatile,edgy cello outbursts of King Crimson’s “Providence,” from
Red (1974), leading me to wonder if the King Crimson band mates listened to Xenakis before improvising that piece. Unlike
ST/4, however, “Providence” eventually gathers momentum to reach a genuine climax; there is no real sense of progression in
ST/4, just regions of greater and lesser activity, or density.
Ergma (1994), Xenakis’s final quartet, was commissioned by the Mondriaan Quartet and is said to pay homage to the famed Dutch artist for which the group named itself. The music is dissonant and almost unrelentingly loud. It also is texturally thick since all four instruments are employing the double stop technique (playing two notes at once) throughout. Right to the end, the composer yielded no quarter to accessibility, but his work is certainly provocative and original.
1 comment:
Thank you so much for the comment on Justin Bieber. I definitely agree and it is definitely true
Post a Comment