music survey 2017

MUSIC 2017: A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY

Steven Greenfield

December 31, 2018

   
       I thought I had a shot at finishing this year-late survey before New Year’s Eve this year; really, I did.  But here we are, at the dawn of 2019, and I am still assessing the music of 2017.  There is always hope for next year!  At least, for the second year in a row, I did manage to review all the pop/rock records I had accumulated.  But I do regret having to forgo the jazz, the classical, and anything that did not fall conveniently into any genre.

       My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2017, and to my partner, Melissa, for her boundless patience and support.  Thanks as well to Aura Salazar, a friend and teacher of Spanish in Middlesex County, N.J., for her assistance with certain translations.

       The list of the best of 2017 ended up looking like my reaction to the whole “Oscars so white” meme, though that was not intentional.  From where I sit, the year just past (a year ago, that is) was a very good one for Latin American performers and, to a lesser extent, African-American or Afro-British ones; not a banner year for everyone else.  In fact, I consider it a weak year overall, with some genuine disappointments, such as Grizzly Bear’s record not being as strong as I had hoped, or The War on Drugs’, or Feist’s.  I decided to award Album of the Year to a Spanish-language disc, a departure for me (not counting Juana Molina’s winning a share of the title a few years back—her lyrics are minimal in any case), not because I want to alienate my non-Spanish-speaking readership but because it is just a damned work of art, from the Uruguayan Jorge Drexler, best known for writing the song “Al Otro Lado del Río,” which won the Academy Award for best song in 2005, for the film The Motorcycle Diaries.

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

1.    Jorge Drexler, Salvavidas de Hielo
2.    Juana Molina, Halo
3.    Public Service Broadcasting, Every Valley
4.    Goldfrapp, Silver Eye
5.    Natalia Lafourcade, Musas: Un Homenaje al Folclore Latinoamericano en Manos de Los Macorinos
6.    Sampha, Process
7.    Thundercat, Drunk
8.    Sylvan Esso, What Now
9.    Odesza, A Moment Apart
10.    Robyn Hitchcock, Robyn Hitchcock
11.    Alvvays, Antisocialites

    ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

JORGE DREXLER, Salvavidas de Hielo (Warner Music Spain)—“Movimiento” (In Motion) is one of the year’s, if not the decade’s, great songs, kicking off an excellent record from Jorge Drexler.  Because the album’s lyrics are entirely in Spanish, it will have flown under the radar of most listeners and critics; more’s the pity.  “Movimiento” recounts how our species, from the time we began walking upright, started to move across the landscape, ever restlessly searching for what lay beyond the horizon.  We are all descendants of—and progenitors of—immigrants, the song says, and the abbreviated chorus declares:  “I’m not from here/But then, neither are you.”  Drexler himself is Uruguayan, the son of a German Jew fleeing the Holocaust, and has been living in Spain in recent years, having partnered with the Spanish actress/singer Leonor Watling, known to English-speaking audiences for her appearances in a couple of Pedro Almodóvar movies.  Drexler is also a polymath, trained as an otolaryngologist, similar to the late novelist Moacyr Scliar, from Porto Alegre, Brazil (not far from Uruguay), a doctor and the child of European Jewish immigrants as well.  His biggest moment on the world stage came without him actually on stage; his “Al Otro Lado del Río” (On the Other Side of the River), written for the film The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), won best song at the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony, yet the Oscars organizers did not deem him suitably recognizable enough to perform it himself, so Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana did instead.  Though a quiet song, “Movimiento” is lively and alert, tingling with hushed anticipation, the guitar accompaniment itself seemingly running through field and forest, until the chorus grants release.  Another clever tune brimming with quiet tension and social critique, moving with lightfooted quickness, is “Silencio.”  The biggest “message” song on the disc, “Despedir a los Glaciares” (Saying Goodbye to the Glaciers), wistful and poetic in its celebration of lost causes, is ultimately a bit of a letdown, as a strongly affecting exposition leads into a featureless, forgettable refrain.  “Mandato” (Command) has a free and easy swing and a catchy, singalong chorus.  “Telefonía” (Telephony), with its country-ish slide guitar opening, and “Quimera” (Chimera) are also well-constructed little ear-pleasers.  Drexler writes in sort of a folk vein, eyes and ears open to the wonders and absurdities of the world in the manner of Brazil’s Tom Zé, if far less eccentric (in “Telefonía,” when he sings, “I leave you this message simply/to repeat something that I already know you know,” there are shades of the great Zé’s “I am explaining things so I can confuse you”), and has a mellifluous tenor voice.  He partners with fellow Latin American performers on several songs.  “Estalactitas” (Stalactites), breezy and pleasant if less stirring than other entries on the disc, pairs his voice with that of Javier Zalember Calequí, an Argentine folk singer who is part of a duo called La Loba.  The touching, 6/8-time ballad “Asilo” (Refuge) has him singing alongside Chile’s Mon Laferte, a Latin Grammy winner for her song “Amárrame” (Tie Me Up).  Like “Silencio,” the song pleads for an interval of peace and quiet apart from the rigors and mundanities of everyday life in order to experience deeper emotions.   “Abracadabras” imports the singer with the brightest wattage of any on the record, the Mexican/American star Julieta Venegas.  Like “Estalactitas,” “Abracadabras” is more ingratiating than profound or soul-searching; the question it poses about “where do the songs that we release upon the wind end up?” seems apropos.  Finally, there is the title track, which translates to “Life Preserver Made out of Ice.”  Another poignantly lovely, pensive ballad rich with Spanish guitar embroidery, its invited vocalist is the Chilean/Mexican Natalia Lafourcade (see below), whose sober, understated demeanor and style of portamento mirror those of Drexler himself.  Salvavidas de Hielo is a sensitively put-together, penetratingly intelligent creative effort that should reward even listeners with no or minimal Spanish-language skills.    A

Sample song  “Movimiento”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIGRyRf7nH4

And the rest . . .

 ACTRESS, AZD (Ninja Tune Records)—Darren Cunningham’s most recording save one as “Actress,” R.I.P, scored highly in my 2012 music survey for its furtive atmospherics and creative experimentation in sonic manipulation and multitracking, drawing comparisons to some of the greats of British electronica, Burial (see the 2007 and 2012 music surveys) and Aphex Twin (see the 2014 music survey).  The curiously titled AZD (acid?) falls well short of the expectations generated by R.I.P, largely because Cunningham seems to be on autopilot for too much of the recording.  The first four tracks are particularly unimpressive, making for a weak start.  In “Fantasynth” and “Blue Window,” the composer is content to present a musical cell (or “cel,” if one thinks in terms of animation), with a set rhythmic pattern and orchestration, and take it straight through to the end as is, with little or no development of any kind.  The same could be said of “There’s an Angel in the Shower,” toward the end of the album.  At least in “Untitled 7,” there is a subtle effort to play around with the underlying rhythms (occasionally), but even this piece comes off as monomaniacal.  The album does not really hit a stride until “X22RME” (not sure if this is supposed to be pronounced, INXS-style, as “extreme”), following the short “Cyn,” which at least breaks the trance of the Easter Island moai–stolid early tracks, even if it does so by opening with a vulgar sampling of a rapper’s patter, as a lead-in to a techno-oriented “tune,” dark and evasive, with plenty of electronic bleeps.  “X22RME” is the one entry on the disc that truly recaptures the magic of R.I.P.  Set to a dance beat, it shows as little variation as its predecessors early on, but eventually Cunningham begins adding disquieting undertones; then, halfway through, he breaks things up completely without losing the sense of rhythmic impulsion altogether, before putting all back in place.  It ends with some Burial-style sampling of conversational snippets.  Incidentally, the record label, Ninja Tune, needs to be aware that what it has posted on YouTube as “X22RME” is actually “Fauré in Chrome.”  The latter is an impressionistic composition, said to be based on a passage from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem (although I did not pick up on this), subtly drawn and, if not downright gloomy, at least foreboding, nearly suspended in terms of time but not of anxiety.  The high-pitched electronic tintinnabulation throughout is unsettlingly akin to noise made by the instrument my dentist uses to break up plaque between teeth.  Like “X22RME,” “Runner” is set to a swift beat and uses undertones to break up the monotony, if not as inventively.  “Falling Rizlas,” although as lyric-less as any other, has a genuine song structure to it and is appealingly blue-moody, the second- or third-best (perhaps after “Fauré in Chrome”) composition on AZD.  Like “Fauré in Chrome” (but unlike the rest of the album), it has no beat and moves so slowly there is barely any sense of rhythmic progression.  Things get sinister with “Dancing in the Smoke,” another piece that leans in the direction of techno, with motoric rhythms and a whooshing sound underneath, garish keyboards, and voices alternately commanding “Dance!” and repeating the words “the future” in a way that sounds as if we have little to look forward to.  Not top-of-the-line Actress, but at least Cunningham is mixing things up here.  The final track, “Visa,” has a brighter tone, a quick cycling of long tones punctuated by percolating synthesizer patterns, bringing back fond memories of early electronic-based tunes, notably the Hot Butter version of “Popcorn” by Gershon Kingsley that stormed up the charts in 1972.  More of the luster of “Visa,” more of the shadowiness of “Falling Rizlas,” but less monochrome altogether would have made for a truly satisfying record.    B+

Sample song  “Falling Rizlas”:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fGNj_Vrbpw

ALVVAYS, Antisocialites (Polyvinyl Records)—Songs on Antisocialites have all the substance of cotton candy.  If I am grading the record higher than its heft would seem to merit, it is because these guys are adept pop songwriters.  Their sweetness is never cloying, and their short tunes are compactly designed and do not wear out their welcome.  Alvvays, on its second release (I have not heard the debut), is a fivesome fronted by Molly Rankin, with a few added musicians in places for good measure.  Rankin, a capable singer with a voice well matched to the material, hails from a famed family of Celtic musicians from Cape Breton Island (her bandmates are from Cape Breton or nearby Prince Edward Island), although overt Celtic influences have not been part of the band’s sound to this point.  Rather, there is a distinct element of dream pop to the group’s admixture; characteristically, this is dispensed with a light hand.  Tempos are generally brisk, and even in the slower numbers, such as the closing “Forget about Life,” Rankin’s phrasing sounds impatient, as if there were a prize for reaching the end of the stanza ahead of the bass and the Farfisa organ.  In any case, “Forget about Life” starts out as a torchy, surf rock–type song, but, amid its brevity, it takes on a plaintive air before ending with a bit of blurry distortion.  The opening tune, “In Undertow,” may be about a crumbling relationship, yet the dreamy wash of sound is so warm, the subject matter hardly registers.  The reverie is less complicated in the succeeding song, “Dreams Tonite,” as it is always (alvvays?) easier to fantasize about someone who catches your eye on the street than it is to maintain a partnership.  In a like vein, “Lollipop (Ode to Jim)” is a breezy number about lusting after the unattainable while navigating mundane realities with less than half a mind’s worth of concentration.  “Plimsoll Punks” is so energetic and spirited that, again, it is hard to take seriously the repeated triplet “getting me down” syncopations.  This song is actually long enough, clocking in at just under five minutes, to contain both a bridge and a short keyboard coda.  One perhaps unexpected influence thrown in is Stereolab:  the pumping bass beat with whoosh-y flourishes that kicks off “Hey” models itself on the title track from that band’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996), even if the rest of the song drifts far from that pattern and toward jangly, Byrds-style guitar licks.  The most disposable tracks on Antisocialites are never less than congenial, and others manage to delve a bit further into life’s complications, making the record a moderately guilty pleasure.    A-/B+

Sample song  “In Undertow”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1n72aCdwdU

ARCADE FIRE, Everything Now (Sonovox/ Columbia Records)—There has been a debate among critics and fans with respect to how this record stands up to previous Arcade Fire issues, as the band struggles to reconceptualize its sound and regain the relevance it had a decade ago, before critics laid into it for The Suburbs (see the 2010 music survey) and, with more justification, Reflektor (see the 2013 music survey).  My impression is that the transition has been awkward for the band.  There is still a definitive “Arcade Fire” sound, yet on Everything Now it is being filtered through various genre forms in an attempt at greater accessibility.  Any number of bands have mined Americana for inspiration, and there is certainly nothing wrong with reinvention when the formula has gotten stale.  Even so, Arcade Fire to its fan base represents a certain antique Americana, acoustic strings and hurdy-gurdies and saloon-style piano, paired with a portentous, class-conscious, Woody Guthrie–esque folk sensibility that is ideally suited to lead singer Win Butler’s Bruce Springsteen–like voice.  That voice is still front and center, although too much of Butler’s singing here is falsetto for my taste.  My biggest beef with Everything Now is not the supposed pandering by making use of various pop styles; it is the general awfulness of the lyrics, baldly stated and often tediously repetitive, reaching a nadir with “Good God Damn” near the album’s end.  With some bands, the verses are almost beside the point, and thus the listener cares little if they are atrocious; that is certainly not the case with Arcade Fire, as earnest a “message band” as U2.  Occasionally, they strike gold, as in the pledge “When Silicon Valley’s melted back into silicon, we’ll find a way to survive” (from the song “Put Your Money on Me”).  Nearly the sum total of the words to “Infinite Content” consists of the tagline “Infinite content/infinite content/we’re infinitely content.”  As a wry take on the numbing of users’ brains by smartphones, apps, and other web services, this is deliciously succinct.  Even so, there is so much more the band could have done with the lyrics than rhyme this with “All your money is already spent.”  Biting social commentary would have given the punchline much more heft.  The band thought enough of “Infinite Content” to do two successive versions of the song, the first more vehement, the second more country-ish in feel.  The big number, however, is the title track, which comes in three flavors.  The first two open the playlist, and the third closes it out.  The initial rendition is mere setup for the second, which is the full flowering of the sunny, piano-led theme, as appealing as anything on one of Arcade Fire’s early records, if nevertheless the idea of consumerist excess eating away at the fabric of society is somewhat muddied in the lyrics.  Even those who do not care for the song ought to credit the band for shining a small spotlight on a neglected cultural figure:  Francis Bebey, the late Cameroonian artist, writer, broadcaster, diplomat, and musician, whose “Coffee Cola Song” from the 1970s is alluded to in the flute line, played here by Bebey’s son Patrick.  Nothing else on the album reaches this glorious pinnacle.  “Signs of Life” has a neo-disco sensibility à la LCD Soundsystem (see below) and is every bit as repetitious.  Certain guitar chord sequences or keyboard timbres elsewhere put me in mind of specific songs from pop music history:  elements of “Electric Blue” suggest “Promises, Promises” (1983) by Naked Eyes, but this song is shriller, with Régine Chassagne singing in a very high register; “Good God Damn” recalls, in its guitar accompaniment, the Eagles’ “One of These Nights” (1975)—otherwise, it is hard to sit through.  “Peter Pan” looks to dub reggae; if some question the appropriation—well, if it was good enough for the Police….  Besides which, unlike the Police, Arcade Fire has an actual Caribbean, Chassagne, although she is obviously no Jamaican.  Apart from the throbbing beat, though, it is a fairly weak entry.  “Chemistry” attempts a zoot-suit sprightliness, with limited success.  The band is more in its strike zone in the tunes “Creature Comfort,” “Put Your Money on Me,” and “We Don’t Deserve Love.”  “Put Your Money on Me” is driven by a Giorgio Moroder–worthy motoric keyboard pattern; its plain-spoken melody acquires harmonic sophistication as it develops.  “We Don’t Deserve Love” has soberingly zoomy strings as it contemplates loneliness and ruined lives.  The words may be clunky at times, especially in “Creature Comfort” (or in “Signs of Life”), but these songs earn their merit badge for pathos, in classic Arcade Fire style.  This, plus the opener, is what redeems the record from its most vituperative critics.  Still, if I am giving Everything Now a slightly lower mark than Reflektor four years ago, that is a matter of having been too generous to the latter at the time.    B+/B

Sample song  “Everything Now”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC30BYR3CUk

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE, Hug of Thunder (Arts & Crafts)—Members of Broken Social Scene are usually mostly off doing their own projects; indeed, two of those are reviewed below (see under “Feist” and “Stars”).  I am always surprised by the long intervals between BSS recordings—this time, seven years since Forgiveness Rock Record (see the 2010 music survey)—but never ought to be, in light of the circumstances.  The collective’s efforts since the breathtaking You Forgot It in People (2003), when musicians like Leslie Feist and Metric’s Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw were far less known, have made for good listening without stretching anyone’s conceptions of what music can be.  In fact, Hug of Thunder slides back a bit from Forgiveness Rock Record, as some of the tracks are simply forgettable and none are truly terrific.  The choicest serving on the platter is the first full song (the record opens with a brief instrumental, “Sol Luna,” and closes with a majestic quasi-instrumental, “Mouth Guards of the Apocalypse,” that would actually be better without its sung coda).  “Halfway Home” is rousing rock with lots of vocal support for bandleader Kevin Drew’s lead singing, from co-leader Brendan Canning to Feist and Amy Millan of Stars to newcomer Ariel Engle, as well as screechy guitar passages and restrained brass/wind fanfares that have been one of the hallmarks of this big-band collective.  The song barely has a developed verse section compositionally, yet the chorus is exuberant enough that it hardly matters.  Haines’s creamy soprano is not the ideal match to a cut titled “Protest Song,” and yet, without it carrying the refrain, the tune would be far less memorable, despite some carryover of the feistiness from “Halfway Home.”  Further, in her lower register, Haines can be cutting in her social commentary.  The video the band released for “Skyline” (see the link below), amid Toronto street scenes, is unexpectedly a tribute to Foreigner, who stopped by for a visit.  It is hard to discern any influences from the older band in this music, but it is part of the musicians’ legacy growing up across Lake Ontario from Lou Gramm’s hometown of Rochester.  In any case, “Skyline” is dreamy and airy if melodically anodyne, marked primarily by its energetic percussion.  “Vanity Pail Kids” has such emphatic drumming from Justin Peroff that it nearly drowns out the grimy vocals, guitars, and winds, in what is the grungiest song BSS has yet produced.  Feist’s turn at lead vocals, for the title track, is largely wasted talent on an almost monotone, drably downcast number.  “Towers and Masons” and “Gonna Get Better” also have a decided charisma deficit.  “Victim Lover,” sung by Lisa Lobsinger, who also featured on the previous Broken Social Scene record, as well as by Drew, is a slow, moody tune that succeeds in building an atmospheric pathos.  By contrast, the song that follows, “Please Take Me with You” (Drew on lead), strikes me as bathetically pleading.  “Stay Happy,” with Engle singing lead, is a departure from the rest of the material, with an easygoing, playful nature, a Caribbean-style lilt, and pretty flute flourishes from David French but also stentorian trombone outbursts from Evan Cranley that presage the anticipation building to an emphatic crescendo at the end.  I am always interested in hearing what Broken Social Scene is up to, but Hug of Thunder is not quite up to its usual standards.    B+
 
Sample song  “Skyline”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfkCDpCInQ

FEIST, Pleasure  (Interscope Records/ Universal Music)—Strangely wan or attenuated choruses are what chiefly characterize Leslie Feist’s first solo recording in six years, making it not worth the long wait.  She continues to work with fellow Canadian producers Chilly Gonzales (Jason Beck) and Dominic “Mocky” Salole, to somewhat less felicitous effect than on her previous release, Metals (see the 2011 music survey).  As with that record, many of the songs on Pleasure are written in a folky, vaguely Western (the singer grew up in Alberta) vein, typified by “I’m Not Running Away.”  Mocky co-wrote four of them with Feist, including the title track, which leads off the disc.  Aiming for an emotional directness, the songs are minimally produced.  The lack of refinement could have been an effective device had the songs has more to say, or had they been delivered more convincingly.  Even with that, there are some interesting production choices.  “Any Party” ends after the protagonist, having avowed repeatedly, “You know I’d leave any party for you,” in fact leaves the party and heads out, to ambient sounds:  footsteps, a barking dog, a train’s horn, and a passing car with the radio blaring, not incidentally, the song “Pleasure.”  The following track, “A Man Is Not His Song,” a dreamy, pensive tune, is capped incongruously by a sampling of the Atlanta metal band Mastodon (again, see the 2011 music survey).  “Century,” which is the best of an underperforming class, ends with Jarvis Cocker mechanistically pondering what a century means in our human reckoning.  This song, like most here, has almost an anti-chorus, yet the rest of it crackles with a tension and energy lacking elsewhere.  It is not the only rhythmically dynamic song; “Pleasure” also engages in wiry syncopations expressed in guitar and drums but in service of about the most tuneless refrain ever conceived.  “Any Party” is the exceptional tune in possessing a genuine, worked-through chorus, whose lyric is cited above, even if the pedestrian verse section is made a bit hokey by Feist’s country-ish whoops out of nowhere.  Another breathy non-refrain refrain mars “Baby Be Simple,” which, like “Any Party,” is a co-written effort with Mocky, though the harmonics accompanying the “lo-la-la-la”s following it as the song fades away give it a certain affecting resonance in the final analysis.  “Lost Dreams” is wistful but has precisely one musical idea, which it presses relentlessly over the course of several minutes, with only minor embroidery.  The slow, bluesy final song, “Young Up,” is directed toward a younger, presumably male, companion.  But what the heck does that advice to “young up” even mean?  Granted, younger people often lack perspective on their short (to this point) lives, but this tune, with its preachy keyboard accompaniment and girl-group woo-hoo embellishments, misses the mark in spite of having, like “Any Party,” a true refrain.  The more innocuous tracks on Pleasure would be redeemed were the material elsewhere better, but, alas, not this time around.        B

Sample song  “Pleasure”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yw1pih-vNw

GOLDFRAPP, Silver Eye (Mute)—Ever dependable as a purveyor of swingy, knowingly hip music, Goldfrapp has not missed a beat with its seventh studio album.  Silver Eye shows that Alison Goldfrapp (vocals and keyboards) and Will Gregory (synthesizers) are still explorers, questing something different each time out.  Although the new release has its share of bright, danceable pop, notably, the song at the top of the tracklist, “Anymore” (see the link below to the video, which was filmed on the sands of Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands), Silver Eye takes a turn toward the darker and more introspective, giving it a more futuristic, even dystopian dimension, quite unlike anything in the band’s catalog.  In order to realize this, the duo solicited the help of producer John Congleton, who had worked with St Vincent and Swans, as well as Bobby Krlic, who records as the Haxan Cloak (see the 2013 music survey) and assisted Björk with production on Vulnicura (2015).  “Zodiac Black” is the most sinister-sounding track, with Alison Goldfrapp’s voice assuming a tensile urgency, half interrogative, half deterministic, while ominous chords in the bass clef and drum programming heighten the sense of alert amid the watery murk.  The following song, “Beast that Never Was,” is intermittently sunnier but still somber and reflective, with the refrain (“I keep something back/Beast that never was/Here between two worlds”) conjuring something out of an episode of Doctor Who.  “Moon in Your Mouth” is more romantically yearning yet still colored by a brooding anxiety expressed in tremulous bass tones.  The final track, “Ocean,” recaptures the cinematic suspense and intensity of “Zodiac Black,” with underworld imagery of self-poisoning and pursuit by unseen forces, its powerful crescendos giving way to sudden silence.  “Become the One” is a throbbing specimen of robotic synthpop, mechanistically uttering a series of transformative verbs, taking on a more human coloration only as the chorus unfolds.  “Faux Suede Drifter,” a slow number co-written with Krlic, is akin to one of Brazilian Girls’ dreamier and more contemplative tunes from a decade ago, wistfully morose without being excessively downcast.  Of the twilight-y songs, the one that fails to enrapture is “Tigerman”; placed right after two swifter-moving tunes at the beginning of the playlist, it seems a dead spot on the record.  The contrast with the more upbeat, poppy songs more typical of Goldfrapp’s prior work is striking.  Like “Become the One,” “Everything Is Never Enough” sheds its monochromatically metallic skin only as the soaring, fizzy refrain takes over.  “Anymore” is a delight.  Although limited in range and development, it revels in its relaxed yet tightly choreographed syncopations.  “Systemagic,” which succeeds it on the tracklist, is a stretchy, midtempo, aspirational piece whose lyric gives rise to the album title.  Magic is a recurring theme on Silver Eye, and although even the funereal undertones supplied by the Haxan Cloak cannot grant the record true profundity, it still manages to be spellbinding enough to suit its purposes, and our own.    A-

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

GRIZZLY BEAR, Painted Ruins (RCA Records/Sony Music Entertainment)—The unevenness of Painted Ruins, in comparison to its predecessor, Shields (see the 2012 music survey), which has risen in my estimation since I reviewed it, leads me to wonder whether the five-year hiatus was wise for Grizzly Bear.  Not only were the songs on Shields generally stronger, but the final song on the current record cannot compare with “Sun in Your Eyes,” easily one of the decade’s best tunes, from the earlier album.  For whatever reason, Grizzly Bear always seems to put the most into its finales, whether “Sun in Your Eyes” or “Colorado” from Yellow House (2006).  The same could be said for Painted Ruins, but “Sky Took Hold,” the closer, simply is not as gripping or elaborately conceived.  It is engaging enough, however, and the splashes of brassy color accenting the verses make it stand out from the rest of the record.  There is plenty else to enjoy on the disc.  Grizzly Bear is one of the more interesting rock bands active these days, never allowing itself to get too settled, which might explain the long waits between releases.  It is a little like Steely Dan in its heyday, in that the note sequence that follows any particular Grizzly Bear lead-in is not necessarily what the ear has been led to expect, yielding some quirky progressions.  This is on display on “Four Cypresses,” “Neighbors,” and “Cut-Out.”  The first two of these were issued as singles, along with “Mourning Sound.”  The latter is the most conventionally melodic piece on the disc, unusually breezy and carefree for this outfit, propelled by the bass guitar, notwithstanding the somber tone of Ed Droste’s tenor voice regardless of context.  In terms of sheer songfulness, “Neighbors” is second only to “Mourning Sound.”  Even so, its refrain is intricately convoluted and bears only a tenuous relationship with what went before it.  “Four Cypresses” has that characteristically twisty, chromatic melody, tied to an unusual song structure, in which the “chorus” is not really a chorus but a discrete developmental section arising in sharp contrast and putting real emotional ballast under the climactic moment, after which the song fades away quietly.  “Cut-Out” is a mishmash, its distinct sections practically warring with each other; the middle of the song suddenly becomes stridently percussive before a reversion to the original theme, which, like those mentioned earlier, is coloristically expressive.  “Losing All Sense,” whose bizarre and rather tacky video stars Busy Philipps (see the link below), features a throbbing rhythm guitar accompaniment and overall is closest in spirit to something from one of the late Beatles records, except when it slows for its very Grizzly refrain.  The record’s opener, “Wasted Acres,” is impressionistic and tonally subversive, never mind the lyrics about having a heart-to-heart with a friend while ripping up the landscape with all-terrain vehicles.  Other songs fare less well.  “Glass Hillside” is Steely Dan on an off day, and “Systole” lacks a pulse and is cloying to boot.  “Three Rings” comes across as an attempt to sound like Thom Yorke and Radiohead (a band with which Grizzly Bear has toured), with limited success.  Because this group clearly is not out of ideas, there is still considerable anticipation attending its releases, even following a stumble.        B+

Sample song  “Losing All Sense”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av-BCG0xjS0

ROBYN HITCHCOCK, Robyn Hitchcock (Yep Roc Records)—Because Robyn Hitchcock’s eponymous record was immediately preceded by an all-acoustic, half-covers disc, The Man Upstairs (see the 2014 music survey), the more apt comparison is with the albums just prior to that:  Love from London (see the 2013 music survey), Goodnight Oslo (see the 2009 music survey), and Olé! Tarantula (2006).  I am skeptical that Hitchcock’s recent decision to base himself in Nashville has done him any favors creatively; I see that city, which I have yet to visit, as living off past glories, even as its renown grows, along with the music industry there and the population generally.  The type of music that is Hitchcock’s signature—oddball tales, surrealistic imagery, English music hall entertainments warped through a lens of psychedelia or folk or indie rock—sits oddly with a place known primarily as a locus of watered-down country music sung by people who look good in tight jeans and ten-gallon hats.  Nonetheless, as the singer “explains” toward the end of the bizarre fable that serves as the CD’s liner notes, Robyn Hitchcock is a set of “English myths, seen from abroad.  These songs were composed off the British mainland, and come to your ears refracted through the prism of Nashville, Tennessee.”  The Nashville influence comes through strongly in the country-ish feel of “I Pray When I’m Drunk” and “1970 in Aspic,” as well as the pedal steel of Russ Pahl elsewhere on the disc.  Location makes it easy for Hitchcock to work alongside performers he likes, people who have made reputations in folk or country or bluegrass or Appalachian music, country by way of California or Australia:  Gillian Welch, Grant-Lee Phillips, Emma Swift.  Anyway, some English myths are more resonant than others.  The best on the disc—“I Want to Tell You about What I Want,” “Mad Shelley’s Letterbox,” “1970 in Aspic,” and “Time Coast”—are typically rockers in which Hitchcock is in his element, spinning madcap yarns from a rich tradition that now stretches back nearly four decades while not overtaxing his never powerful and now even less supple voice.  “I Want to Tell You about What I Want” drips with sarcasm about politics, faith, and technology, while “Mad Shelley’s Letterbox” (the liner notes feature a character called Mad Shirley) expresses tenderness toward the marginalized “odd birds” of British society.  In “Time Coast,” the singer is perhaps poking fun at himself and his fans in reciting, “I’m singing to the ruins … I’m singing from the past/I’m singing like a fossil/Time goes by so fast,” while the bit about being naked in the amniotic sea is classic Hitchcock imagery that is slyly suggesting rebirth.  I have considerable sympathy for “1970 in Aspic,” although it has surprisingly little to say about that particular year, instead limning a peculiar standoff between good and evil, with Jesus as a referee of sorts.  Since I am about nine years younger than Hitchcock, his 1970 is my 1979, a year of major transitions (between living at home and going to college).  Other songs are droll (“I Pray When I’m Drunk”) or touching by offering a bit of biography, as in the case of “Raymond and the Wires,” centering on his experiences as a kid riding the trolleybus with his father, the novelist Raymond Hitchcock, whose bad leg did not allow him to climb to the upper level.  (This is a much tamer song than the last one to mention a trolleybus, “The Authority Box” from Olé! Tarantula, which imbued the coach with sexual longing.)  “Autumn Sunglasses” begins with a bit of quasi-orientalist guitar noodling of the kind we have heard before, on, say, Globe of Frogs (1988) or “Antwoman” from Jewels for Sophia (1999), before reverting to a fairly conventional, if psychedelically tinged, melody.  The other entries are more humdrum.  “Virginia Woolf” is as much about Sylvia Plath as about the titular figure.  Altogether, I would judge that the self-titled disc is less formulaic than Love from London while not having quite as much heart or consistency as Olé! Tarantula or Goodnight Oslo.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Autumn Sunglasses”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5wVlYI42ro

HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF, The Navigator (ATO Records)—This album sits restlessly under the rubric of those records I wanted to like more than I actually did.  Hurray for the Riff Raff is essentially one woman, Alynda Mariposa Segarra (who happens to be the daughter of former New York City Deputy Mayor Ninfa Segarra), backed by various musicians when needed.  My first exposure to Hurray for the Riff Raff came at the Nosotros Festival, organized by Segarra herself, at Damrosch Park as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series in the summer of 2017, together with Xenia Rubinos, Helado Negro, and Las Cafeteras.  I recall being surprised to see that Hurray for the Riff Raff already had a following since I had never heard of the group.  But The Navigator is actually its sixth full-length album.  Because I first saw the band as part of a collection of “Latin” acts, I was further confounded by the extent to which this music eschews Latin rhythms, traditions, and instrumentation.  Even more so because, on The Navigator, Segarra is reaching back to her Puerto Rican roots, her family’s on the island and her own experiences growing up in the Bronx.  In fact, we do not get even a hint of Latin cadences until toward the end of the fifth song, “Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl,” and, from that point forward, the boricua-Caribbean elements continue to be largely understated.  Segarra is interested in the blues, folk and Americana, and doo-wop, and these influences all pervade The Navigator despite its mission statement of re-examining what it means to be Puerto Rican on the North American mainland today.  As grand social critiques go, it falls well short of the razor sharpness of Calle 13 at its best (see, in particular, the 2010 music survey) or even West Side Story (1957), as much as some have complained that Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s great musical resorted to stereotyping.  In fact, the crux of the problem with The Navigator is that Segarra is never clear, or even creatively ambiguous, about what she wants it to say.  In the title song (which is one of the few that is set to a gentle Latin rhythm, with touches of surf rock guitar), the titular character asks, “Where will all my people go?”  But it is the role of a navigator to steer; you would not want one who needs to consult others for direction.  The advice proffered in “Pa’lante” (Forward), “be something,” is too trite and unilluminating to be worth a second thought.  “Rican Beach” conjures a dystopia in which a wall is built to keep the singer’s people apart from the mainstream, which is topical enough, except that the wall that our bigot-in-chief wants aims to keep out Mexicans and Central Americans, not Puerto Ricans, who can come and go freely.  And the identity of the sinister “they” who are robbing people of their heritage and possessions never is made apparent.  A number of the early songs sound derivative of the genres they invoke, whether it be bar blues (“Life to Save”), a black spiritual (the Entrance), or folk (“Living in the City,” “Halfway There”).  There simply is not enough of an original voice for Segarra to own these tunes.  The album finds its stride in its final third, following the calmly delivered verbal morass that is “Rican Beach.”  “Fourteen Floors” is plangent and bluesy without seeming derivative, a softly touching number for voice, piano, and a smattering of percussion.  “Settle” litltingly evokes the Drifters on “Under the Boardwalk” (1964).  The biggest number is “Pa’lante,” coming second from the end.  It, too, is a sort of woolly skein, starting as a heartfelt “I just want to be free to live my life” protest, with Segarra’s plaintive voice set to simple piano accompaniment, punctuated by that dreadful “be something” tagline, then moving to something jauntier (echoes of Regina Spektor, perhaps), if not letting go of the blues entirely.  But it is only after sampling some abysmally bald street poetry by Pedro Pietri, from “Puerto Rican Obituary,” that the song comes into its own, as Segarra invokes her family, friends, inspirations, and ordinary puertorriqueños, urging them forward as her refrain rings out; this section never fails to send a chill up my spine.  The Finale is a stirring, Latin-spiced duet between Segarra and a Venezuelan-born, deep-voiced, lesbian Seattle singer, Yvarume Tapia, who styles herself as Yva Las Vegass.  The song puts me in mind of the duet between Gal Costa and Maria Bethânia on Dorival Caymmi’s “Oração de Mãe Menininha” (Mother’s Prayer), as performed on Costa’s record Meu Nome É Gal (1988), ending with a percussion chorus lasting a minute and a half.  The album’s CD jacket is styled like a Playbill, with a cast, a list of musical numbers, and a bare-bones, underdeveloped synopsis, suggesting that Segarra might have aspirations to be the next Lin-Manuel Miranda.  Since she does have a voice with considerable character and appeal, and clearly some songwriting talent to go with it (even if she has yet to put it all together cohesively), I would not be entirely surprised this time around.        B+

Sample song  “Hungry Ghost”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xRJ-MuN46E

JAPANESE BREAKFAST, Soft Sounds from Another Planet (Dead Oceans)—Sensitive, thoughtfully executed, yet less than gripping—this is my takeaway from Michelle Zauner’s second solo effort (I have not heard the debut) as Japanese Breakfast.  The Philadelphia-based, Eugene, Oregon–raised Zauner had previously fronted an emo band called Little Big League that grew out of her student days at Bryn Mawr College, before her mother’s (ultimately terminal) illness called her back to Eugene, where she began working on her own musical projects.  Soft Sounds from Another Planet is not specifically about dealing with that loss, although the confessional lyrics often take stock of how relationships survive the suffering of serious blows as well as contending with smaller-scale disappointments and setbacks.  Zauner has a nice voice that at times puts me in mind of Emily Haines of Metric, in terms of both timbre and the emotional intelligence conveyed, tinged with vulnerability and an unforced sensuality.  The album’s best song, “Diving Woman,” is the first we hear, and nothing else comes close to it, alas.  There is a breezy sunniness that comes through in the shoegaze-style guitars and breathy, aspirational vocals of “Diving Woman,” a tune inspired by the famed female divers of Jeju Island in South Korea, whose fishing has become the mainstay of their families and society.  “Machinist,” a sci-fi tale of making love with an android, à la Humans, the AMC television series, is suitably chilly and a bit creepy but at the same time as much in the manner of divulging confidences as anything on the disc, and whereas this tension between remoteness and intimacy could have the makings of high art, here it falls well short, settling for the contrast between the Auto-Tune of the singer and the complaisant saxophone embroidery offered by David Bartler.  The title tune’s opening sustained organ chords are Procol Harum–ish, even if ultimately no one would mistake this lilting, waltzing ballad for “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (1967), particularly when the pedal steel is more in line with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” (1973).  “Boyish,” while not terribly compelling as a tune, distills the essence of the romantic/sexual frustration that Zauner wanted to express, letting rip a couple of zingers:  “I can’t get you off my mind/I can’t get you off in general” and “I want you, and you want something more beautiful.”  Zauner’s vocals become a little more strained in songs that are tougher to sing toward the end of the record, such as “The Body Is a Blade” and “Till Death.”  The soft, queryingly reflective song that more or less rounds out the disc (it is followed without pause by an instrumental, “Here Come the Tubular Bells,” that could be taken as its coda), “This House,” ends in peculiarly unresolved fashion, tonally and thematically.  I suppose this is how Zauner intended it, letting the sentiment that she owes it to her companions that she survived the year serve as the conclusion.  In that this is mildly unsatisfying, it stands as a microcosm of Soft Sounds from Another Planet, its occasionally razor-keen and more than occasionally perceptive, if not always fully coherent, lyrical sensibility married to music that seems featureless and underdeveloped.    B+/B

Sample song  “The Body Is a Blade”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmXnuD-JpOs

NATALIA LAFOURCADE, Musas: Un Homenaje al Folclore Latinoamericano en Manos de Los Macorinos, Vol. 1 (Sony Music Latin)—When we last left Natalia Lafourcade (see the 2009 music survey), she was learning English in Canada, presumably with an eye toward broadening her audience.  Since then, she has ventured in the opposite direction, delving into Mexican—and now pan–Spanish-speaking American—roots music.  For the current album, whose title translates as Muses: An Homage to Latin American Folklore in the Hands of Los Macorinos, she is beginning to tread into Lila Downs territory, although no one would ever mistake her soft voice for the showier one of Downs, a singer of Oaxacan (and Minnesotan) origin.  Los Macorinos, Lafourcade’s “backing band” and her Buena Vista Social Club for this set, is a duo of guitarists:  Miguel Peña, who hails from Jalisco state originally, and Juan Carlos Allende, an Argentine who has made a career in Mexico for more than thirty years.  Other musicians took part in each track as well, notably Gustavo Guerrero, a young (by contrast, Los Macorinos are of an older generation) Venezuelan with wild, Gustavo Dudamel–style hair, who served in effect as music director for the aggregation of musicians, while singing and playing percussion or strings on various tracks.  The way the album is organized, the first half (six songs) consists, with one exception, of original songs by Lafourcade; on a couple of them, she had co-songwriters.  The second half (another six) is by other composers of an earlier vintage, generally (again, with one exception) Latin American.  Lafourcade has honed her compositional skills over the decade-plus that she has been performing and recording; while I do not admire everything on the record’s first half with equal ardor, just as I could live happily without some of the selections on the second half, her songs at their best stand up to the classics.  In particular, “Tú Sí Sabes Quererme” (You Know How to Love Me), midway between shuffle and sashay, brims with a confident romanticism.  No less an achievement is “Mi Tierra Veracruzana” (My Land of Veracruz).  Rhythmically tricky and finely balanced, it begins with a music-box delicacy and minimal guitar accompaniment and ends more boisterously, as the vocal volume is amped up in concert with the chorus and added instrumentation.  Of the slower originals, “Mexicana Hermosa” (Beautiful Mexican Girl), co-written with Guerrero, is most like something from Downs’s 2006 album La Cantina, a waltz but also a llanto, an empathetic cry.  The bolero “Soldedad y el Mar” (Solitude and the Sea) was composed in part by David Aguilar, who also contributed to Jorge Drexler’s record (see above).  Another lamentation rounds out the first half of the disc, Violeta Parra’s “Qué He Sacado con Quererte” (What Have I Gotten Out of Loving You), haunting especially in light of the knowledge that its author, a renowned Chilean folk singer, committed suicide by gunshot at age forty-nine in 1967.  Also eerie in setting is Simón Díaz’s “Tonada de la Luna Llena” (Tune of the Full Moon).  Its Venezuelan author died just a few years ago in his eighties; though he is best known for writing “El Caballo Viejo” (The Old Horse), which supplied the melody that formed the verse section of the Gipsy Kings’ “Bamboléo” (1987), this wounding song appeared in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Flower of My Secret, in a rendition by Caetano Veloso.  Here it is a disconcerting duet, with Guerrero assuming the Veloso countertenor and singing sometimes in the same range as Lafourcade, sometimes underneath her soprano.  For “Tú Me Acostumbraste” (I’m Accustomed to You), the most famous song from the Cuban songwriter Frank Domínguez, who, like Díaz, died in 2014, well into in his eighties, Lafourcade partnered with the deep-voiced Omara Portuondo, of the real Buena Vista Social Club.  Though it is pitched as a slowly smoldering ballad, this performance left me a little cold, perhaps too studiedly refined.  In the case of “Soy Lo Prohibido” (I Am the Forbidden One) by Mexico’s Roberto Cantoral and Argentina’s Dino Ramos and “Te Vi Pasar” (I Saw You Go by) from Agustín Lara, an illustrious Mexican singer and songwriter, I am not certain that we are necessarily getting the best samples of their material, especially with Lara, to whom Lafourcade has already devoted an entire album of songs, in 2012.  I am not sure what led the singer to choose that hoary (and decidedly not Latin American) Harry Warren/Jack Brooks chestnut “That’s Amore,” a staple of mediocre Italian restaurants across North America, for another cover.  Translated into Spanish lyrics, it becomes “Son Amores,” but what is truly intriguing is not Lafourcade’s approach to an old-time hit so much as what happens with the orchestration just as she is concluding:  a minute-or-so dreamy instrumental interval involving three different keyboards (piano, harmonium, xylophone) plus vibraphone is redolent of the arrangements used to support Elis Regina a couple of generations back; very circa 1960s Brazil in spirit.  The album ends with a peaceable, pretty instrumental for the guitarists, “Vals Poético” (Poetic Waltz) by Felipe Villanueva, a late-nineteenth-century Mexican Romantic composer.  That this disc was labeled as Volume 1 leads naturally to expectations of more to come.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Tú Sí Sabes Quererme”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLT6hdgEek

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, American Dream (DFA Records/ Columbia Records)—Having un-broken-up recently, LCD Soundsystem was quick to the studio to record American Dream, its fourth album.  It is, despite its prodigious length (nearly 69 minutes), a slighter achievement than its predecessors, particularly Sound of Silver (see the 2007 music survey), the band’s magnum opus.  In a sense, it is bandleader James Murphy’s Remain in Light (1980), nearly four decades after that Talking Heads record turned listeners on their ears.  “Primitivist” or “tribal” rhythms are paired with bare-bones melodies in dance-friendly mode.  Really not all that different from earlier LCD records, just starker in its execution.  Although guitars are not absent from the disc, their presence is overshadowed by the multiple types of synthesizers used, plus percussion.  Murphy’s bandmates contribute, to the songwriting as well as the performance, but he plays most of the instruments himself, and LCD Soundsystem is still his project primarily.  One of his longtime associates in the band, Nancy Whang, is strangely absent from the disc, with the exception of the second song, “Other Voices,” which she co-wrote and in which she takes a brief speaking role toward the end.  This tune is the most David Byrne–like of all, with the synths adding an overlay of what sounds like King Crimson “elephantosity” (viz. the song “Elephant Talk” from 1981).  “Change Yr Mind” is another Talking Heads–influenced track, featuring a beat and bass line compatible with “Once in a Lifetime” but also some yowling guitar accents.  I could live without the first and last tracks, “Oh Baby” and “Black Screen.”  Both move deliberately, the former saccharine and percolating with deadpan pleading from Murphy, the latter almost funereally somber, with a protracted instrumental lead-in and fadeout.  “Tonite” is wordy and full of characteristically tongue-in-cheek commentary from Murphy, set to a Giorgio Moroder–type disco-beat ostinato.  “Call the Police,” also verbose and dripping with acid irony, makes a gesture toward a full-bodied theme, complete with melodic development, its guitars racing as if in tribute to Franz Ferdinand or Phoenix.  The song with the most thoughtfully composed melody, and therefore the most appealing, is “I Used to,” co-written with bandmate Al Doyle.  This one actually has a guitar-led bridge section.  “How Do You Sleep?” is the runner-up among the playlist entries, largely because its long slow development builds to impressive intensity, going from a U2-esque declamation (little except voice and percussion) to something that pings, ripples, flares, and reverberates thunderously.  The piece includes cello and mandolin from Doyle, but one does not notice the acoustic strings until the very end, when all other tracking drops away, leaving just the mandolin.  The title track is suitably dreamy, set in a gently waltzing 3/4, with arrangements akin to (shudder) Kool and the Gang’s “Cherish” (1985).  Overly long, highly repetitive, concentrating its best material in the middle of the playlist, American Dream still glimmers, if only intermittently.    B+

Sample song  “Oh Baby”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gIhrPGyu6U

JUANA MOLINA, Halo (Crammed Discs)—The perspective in “Al Oeste” (To the West), the final song on Juana Molina’s marvelous Halo, is unexpected:  she writes, “A window that looks north gets no sun,” which is a Northern Hemisphere point of view.  Yet, Molina is Argentine, and although she lived in Los Angeles for a time and still does some of her production work in the United States, all indications are that she now bases herself back home in Buenos Aires, where north-facing windows are the sunny ones.  In any case, “Al Oeste” is an unusually sunny song (relatively) for Molina, an electronic wizard of the dark arts.  Then again, for all her love of dusky settings and minor-mode chord progressions, shafts of sunlight do penetrate a number of Halo’s compositions, like “Cosoco” and “Los Pies Helados” (Frozen Feet)—the latter is actually about waiting for the sun to come out and warm stiff limbs.  So the imagery conjured by the music is not solely that of dim closets and shadowy corridors from which dusty mannequins and animatronic creatures emerge to perform bizarre dances.  This is a long album, nearly an hour in duration, with twelve tracks, nine of which have recognizable lyrics (in Spanish), and the other three have Molina uttering the song title and mumbling indecipherably—her version of scatting.  The songs demonstrate that the artist, now in her mid-fifties, has not suffered any dulling of her creative edge.  Even though what she is putting across on Halo differs minimally in stylistic terms from her previous two records, Un Día, which shared in my Album of the Year honors for 2008, and Wed 21 (see the 2013 music survey), she is by no means repeating herself or living off past glories.  Rather, Molina, like a chemist in a lab, is synthesizing, with minimal help with arrangements and other instruments (percussion especially) in spots from a few friends, ever new compounds of sound, precipitating exquisite details out of the hush and the murk and layering substrates that sublimate into atmospherics that are thoroughly convincing.  Moreover, she is doing so to slinky or rubbery rhythms that fit the mood and keep the listener rooted.  There are tracks one could try dancing to, such as the largely wordless “A00 B01” and “In Lassa,” although the steps might end up herky-jerky or robotic.  “Cosoco” has the most aggressive syncopations, followed by “Cara de Espejo” (Face of the Mirror).  “Paraguaya,” the opening song, has a clockwork beat—that is, if a clock ticked syncopated time.  The umbral synthesizer sustained-tone ornamentation here seems ready-made for a horror or sci-fi soundtrack.  The follow-up, “Sin Dones” (Not Gifted), grounds its unremarkable melody on a simple, rising three-chord progression that is nonetheless denatured through haze and distortion, as if the sounds were emerging from the bottom of a sump.  Not a tremendous voice, Molina’s is nonetheless distinctive, thickly textured, breathy, and sotto voce at all times, and she creates a multitude of effects, as on “Sin Dones,” through multitracking it.  “Lentísimo Halo” (Very Slow Will-o’-the-Wisp), true to its name, is almost painfully slow and funereal yet succeeds in maintaining a suspenseful tension throughout.  “Cálculos y Oráculos” (Calculations and Oracles) is also relaxed in its pacing.  In a weird way, its chord sequence resembles that of “40,” the “benediction” closing out U2’s War (1983), even if the two are very different in tone and melody, with Molina’s song seemingly enveloped in a barbiturate-laced fog.  Galumphing and portentous, “Estalactitas” (Stalactites)—the second song with that title in this survey, after Jorge Drexler’s (see above)—lumbers entertainingly like a Frankenstein monster into a barrage of percussion; still, its theme is a serious one (“what once was will never return”; “this is the end of us two/this is the end of what we once perceived as eternal”).  Molina’s lyrics use a simpler Spanish than Drexler’s, to express more primal emotions.  A few of the songs might go on longer than necessary, but that hardly detracts from the spellbinding essence of Halo.    A

Sample song  “Paraguaya”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzqnISROwhQ

ODESZA, A Moment Apart (Counter Records/Foreign Family Collective)—One of two albums in this survey (along with Sylvan Esso; see below) nominated for a Grammy for best dance/electronic album (neither actually won) of 2017, A Moment Apart provides plush settings for numerous vocalists, some of whom are frustratingly uncredited, to showcase their talents.  In an interview with Boston’s WBUR, the duo that comprises Odesza, Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight, admitted that they were looking for sounds to make the hair on the back of the listener’s neck stand on end, and, at times, they succeed.  One of the hazards of doing a record of this type, in which the creators sort of fade into the background while a parade of guests takes the spotlight, is that of blurred identity:  just what makes a song characteristically “Odesza”?  The same issue had to be confronted (or not) on various albums appearing in the music survey in recent years, from M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (2011) to Calvin Harris’s 18 Months (2012) to Galactic’s Carnivale Electricos (also 2012) to Flight Facilities’ Down to Earth (2014), even going back to Zero 7’s The Garden, which was my Album of the Year for 2006, before I began putting these reviews online.  Indeed, on the less engaging tracks, Odesza serves as the pretty upholstery for middling to mediocre (I am thinking in particular of the single “Line of Sight” featuring WYNNE [Rory Wynne Andrews] and the Australian trio Mansionair) pop and R&B.  That said, Knight and Mills display an impressively self-assured touch, given that neither one has yet reached his thirtieth birthday as of the writing of this review (by the time of publication, Knight likely will have).  A Moment Apart is their third record together; the first was issued shortly after their graduation from Western Washington University in 2012.  Following a slight setting of a near-monologue from the movie Another Earth (2011) in the Intro, the album immediately blossoms into ecstasy with the uplifting title track, itself cinematic in its sweep and coloration, yet with moments of meditativeness as well.  The string arrangement is by Philip Sheppard, but the identity of the female vocalist chanting the chorus of this quasi-instrumental remains a mystery.  The composers were seeking an aura of euphoria worthy of M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, and here they hit paydirt.  Nothing else on the disc quite measures up.  Of the other compositions with only minimal vocal tracery, the most satisfying is the brash “La Ciudad” (The City), striding ahead on a mambo-inspired beat with lots of handclaps, ending with big, slow drumbeats and what sounds like a musical simulation of a creaking door or gate.  Like “A Moment Apart,” it is arranged with an orchestral lushness that would translate well to a film score.  “Late Night,” which was one of the first tracks released as a single, is danceable and infectious in its pop hooks but ultimately less substantive.  “Meridian” is beat-heavy and tremulous and marked by its vocal samplings dug up from the Spectrasonics Legacy catalog’s Heart of Africa; some of these African vocals are manipulated to Alvin and the Chipmunks range (“I still want a hula hoop!”).  The songs with more conventional vocals and invited singers vary considerably in quality.  “Across the Room” features neo-soul singer Leon Bridges.  The verse portion, which he sings, strikes me as ho-hum; where the song really reaches its glory is the chorus, in which Bridges moves to the background and another (uncredited) female singer moves to the fore, along with a repeated plinking piano chord, giving the song a richness and pathos that would otherwise be entirely absent.  Although I have given her own records poor marks recently (see the 2012 and 2016 music surveys), I still admire Regina Spektor and love her unique voice, which is framed well by Odesza in her yearning, reflective solo turn, “Just a Memory.”  The breathy vocals of Paulina Reza of the Chamanas, an El Paso–based group, on “Everything at Your Feet” are the only Spanish lyrics on the disc, paired with the stately trumpet soloing of Brennan Carter.  At the end, the song is reduced to its ground bass, dreamy keyboard arpeggios and a jingly percussion with handclaps that is put into ritardando, like a music box running down, a brilliant touch.  The church-chorale ethos of the verse section of “Falls” becomes a march-beat tattoo of reassurance in its refrain, swinging to exuberance in the post-chorus whoops of Sasha Sloan, a talented young singer/actress whose voice is strikingly like that of Sia (who appeared on half the tracks of the aforementioned The Garden).  Even more like a heavenly choir is the opening of the final track, “Corners of the Earth,” which is the star turn for the Aussie RY X (Ry Cuming).  I do not much care for his trembly voice-of-the-prophet vibe; even so, the song serves reasonably well as a solemn benediction, and it is a nice turn of events that it ends with the same tick-tocking sound that was described in the Intro.  The saving grace for Odesza is these guys’ finely honed sense of how cushy arrangements and amplification can make all but the feeblest pop hooks and tunes sound good, even in instances where one might question their taste in collaborators.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Across the Room” (featuring Leon Bridges):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEW_n1922vk

ONDATRÓPICA, Baile Bucanero (Soundway Records)—Will Holland and Mario Galeano’s lengthy (15 tracks, about a full hour) follow-up to their project’s self-titled debut, which managed (just) to make my list of top albums of the year (see the 2012 music survey), is mostly a miss, unfortunately.  Intended as a synthesis between mainland Colombian styles and those prevalent on Providence Island in the Caribbean, which has a considerable Anglophone population and is much closer to Nicaragua (which still has an unrecognized territorial claim to it) than to South America, it comes off as hackneyed, regardless of which genre of music is being mined.  Rather than a true melding, a number of tracks (those recorded in Bogotá) sound typically “Spanish-American,” while others (recorded on Providence) are recognizably Anglo-Caribbean.  For a much more successful synthesis, one would do well to investigate the work of Sidestepper, another Anglo-Colombian (Holland is English as well) joint venture birthed by Richard Blair, particularly the 2003 record 3AM: In Beats We Trust.  Nor is the “Latin” music on Baile Bucanero (Pirates’ Dance) nearly as innovative as that of the album’s predecessor, to say nothing of Galeano’s own work as Frente Cumbiero (see the 2011 music survey).  The disc involved around 35 musicians in all, a number of whom have writing credits; in fact, in several instances, singers are interpreting their own songs, so there is plenty of blame to go around, especially as I do not care for some of the voices:  Shala Boom on Holland’s opener, “Commotion,” or Michi Sarmiento on “Hummingbird,” “Malaria,” and “Bogotá.”  Sometimes, as in the case of “Hummingbird,” a good groove is wasted on a melody that is more scaffold than substance (and more cried out than actually sung).  Other times, as with Nidia Góngora’s “De Mar a Mar” (From Sea to Sea, which she sings herself) or with “Bogotá,” a compelling harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment is paired with a dispiritingly unsophisticated tune.  Of the “Anglo” tunes, “Come Back Again,” written as a collaboration between Galeano and (presumably) a Providence native, while not unpleasant, is warmed-over dancehall (again, Sidestepper has done it better), while the reggae-ish “Trustin’” (a similar collaboration involving Holland) is amiable if unexceptionable.  Given my feelings about some of the singers engaged, it is not surprising that the best tracks are instrumentals.  Head and shoulders above the others is Galeano’s “Caldo Parao” (named for a kind of thick soup), a swift current of a composition characterized by the harmonic interweaving of a gaita (traditional native flute).  It has a dynamism and drive missing from too much of the album and shows that Galeano, at least, has not lost his edge.  The pair of instrumentals that close out the record, “Cumbia Bucanera” and “Just a Moment,” both written by Holland, are appealing if less impressive.  The former has a subdued cumbia beat and lots of accordion, played by Holland himself; toward the end, it accelerates frenetically.  The latter is a gentle reverie led by the languid sound of a lap steel guitar, which blends nicely with the other guitar part and the horns (trumpet and sax).  “Malaria,” a quasi-instrumental from Galeano, is the second-most fetching tune, feverishly churning and with excellent ensemble work between the accordion, Rhodes keyboard, guitar, horns, and percussion.  Of the other songs with words, Wilson Viveros’s rhythmically intricate, almost merengue-like lament “Boga Canoero” (roughly, Strokes of the Canoeman, sung by Markitos Micolta) is best, followed by the well-executed if conventional cumbia “Soy Campesino” (I Am a Farmer), done in a style harking back to Lucho Argaín and his La Sonora Dinamita.  These glints of promise do not really compensate for the lackluster material that makes Baile Bucanero a disappointingly tepid album.    B+/B

Sample song  “Hummingbird”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW2v5Yqt84I

POND, The Weather (Marathon Artists/BMG Chrysalis)—When a recording is intended as a concept album but that is not at all apparent to the more than casual listener, this is problematic.  Nicholas Allbrook, Pond’s bandleader and vocalist, explained to NME that the record is “not completely about Perth [the band’s hometown], but focusing on all the weird contradictory things that make up a lot of colonial cities around the world.”  Uh, OK, if you say so, Nick!  There are references that are decidedly local:  Cardinal Pell, the high-ranking Australian prelate at the Vatican facing sexual abuse charges; Gina Reinhart (misspelled on the lyrics sheet as “Reinhardt”), one of the world’s richest women as inheritor of a mining fortune in Western Australia; Lateline, an ABC (that is, Australian Broadcasting Corporation) current affairs show; “the Woodside” could be a reference to a major Aussie oil and gas extraction company headquartered in Perth.  But it is all pretty scattershot.  Two songs are titled “Edge of the World,” and that could well describe Perth, sitting at the western edge of Australia facing the Indian Ocean and out toward all the very different cultures that lie beyond it.  If the lyrics work overtime in an elusive chase for the grand statement, the music is hit or miss.  There is some decent stuff on The Weather, and also a fair amount that is not.  The opener, “30000 Megatons,” begins in a hush cushioned by dreamy synthesizer arpeggios, gaining volume in its own good time, only when it reaches its long-delayed chorus and postlude.  The message seems to be:  The world is on a hair trigger for mutually assured destruction, in more ways than simply having missiles pointed at each other, so why not get it over with already?  “Colder than Ice,” which seems to have little to do with the album’s thematic framework, is simply a cool dance tune featuring Kirin J Callinan, who is an Australian singer (he used to be a guitarist in a band called Mercy Arms), actor (was in Jane Campion’s television series Top of the Lake), and all-around larger than life personality.  True to its title, “A/B” abruptly switches midstream, from a frenzied, shaggy-haired rocker laden with white noise and yelping vocals about living a frantic high life to a piano-accompanied lullaby of sorts, soft handclaps thrown in at no extra charge, with the object of affection being a teen drug addict.  More weird than good, but Pond does not lose points on inventiveness.  “Zen Automaton,” despite the whininess of its lyric, is convincing in its plaintiveness and has some lovely, moody arrangements for piano, saxophone, horns, and an exotically tinged flute line.  The titular track, coming at the end of the set, pays greatest homage to the psychedelia that both Pond and its associated band Tame Impala (see the 2012 and 2015 music surveys) have trafficked in, its wah-wah guitars reaching back to David Gates and Bread on “If” (1971), yet some of the guitarwork also recalls Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” (1976).  It also sits closest to the material on Pond’s previous (superior) effort, Man It Feels Like Space Again (see the 2015 music survey), as a sun-kissed, glorious cri de coeur with muddled lyrics.  Of the two “Edge of the World”s, only tangentially related, Part 2 is considerably the better, particularly as it moves into its coda (the part that mentions Reinhart and Lifeline, as well as cokeheads and El Niño, as things that “get you down”), which is a glory in its own right, worthy of the Electric Light Orchestra in its heyday.  “Paint Me Silver” samples the theme of Todd Rundgren and Utopia’s largely instrumental “Cosmic Convoy” (2012), but this does not save it from mediocrity, nor does the one line sung by Amber Fresh, of the Perth band Rabbit Island; likewise, “Sweep Me off My Feet” and “All I Want for Xmas (Is a Tascam 388)” do little for me.  Thus, the loosely draped “concept” is not the only issue with The Weather; musically, it is at the same time all over the map, grabbing for more than it can process, and qualitatively uneven.    B+

Sample song  “The Weather”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS-bqTWOuKI

PUBLIC SERVICE BROAD- CASTING, Every Valley (PIAS Recordings)—The mission of the group Public Service Broadcasting was laid out in the title of its first album, Inform, Educate, Entertain (see the 2013 music survey).  At times, I have wondered whether the first two parts have been given precedence over the third.  However, whereas the first two records were largely lighthearted, even when considering a topic as weighty and world-altering as The Race for Space (see the 2015 music survey), the tone turns more somber with Every Valley, the band’s third full-length effort.  Focused on the legacy of coal mining in South Wales, it is Public Service Broadcasting’s most thoroughly realized and affecting album to date.  J. Willgoose, the bandleader and songwriter, has “mined” various archives, particularly those of the British Film Institute but also The Welsh Miner documentary film, the South Wales Miners’ Library, the Dick Cavett Show, and others.  This is not merely social history research set to cool beats, though.  The arrangements are handled as sensitively as any good soundtrack composer would, and since this particular composer is an active participant, along with bandmates Wrigglesworth and JF Abraham, the record goes well beyond simply setting background music to a drama.  The only other recording I can think of that as powerfully relates the perspectives of a troubled coal mining region is Over the Rhine’s Ohio (2003), although that did not specifically focus on mining.  The combination of electronic music and sampling from industrial public relations material also harkens back to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s nautically themed Dazzle Ships (1983).  The atmospheric sense of profound loss that pervades the latter stages of the album also is kindred spirit to the soundtrack from the movie The Sweet Hereafter (1997).  Following the scene-staging opener (the title track), which is set to softly chiming guitars but with added forces from string and brass sections, the first several tracks reflect the brimming confidence of an industry running at full steam.  Even as “The Pit” recognizes the difficulties associated with mining the seams, these are brushed aside as chance occupational hazards, as statistics are thrown our way along with ringing declaratives from pedantically authoritative narrators about the importance of Welsh coal to powering the U.K. economy.  Even so, the baleful long tones Willgoose renders for the bass trombones and bass clarinet refuse to let the dangers be forgotten.  “People Will Always Need Coal” begins with snippet of a vintage T.V. recruitment commercial for the mines and intersperses other snippets, and is relentlessly upbeat, while “Progress” has Camera Obscura lead singer Tracyanne Campbell piping repeatedly, “I believe in progress.”  The mood begins to shift with “Go to the Road,” still briskly paced but more neutral in tonal coloration, which marks not just the closing of one mine but entertains the thought that its idled workers will not be able to pick up work elsewhere in the business.  “All Out” turns from softer sounds to blazing hard rock as, for the first time, we encounter striking miners.  “Turn No More” is an actual song, with lyrics taken from “Gwalia Deserta,” by the late Welsh poet Idris Davies, composed by Willgoose and the Manic Street Preachers lead singer James Dean Bradfield and sung by the latter.  Davies’s verses, set to this music, could comfortably sit within the set list of any progressive-minded metal band of today, such as Opeth or Pallbearer.  “They Gave Me a Lamp” is a quieter, slower piece, contemplating women’s role in tending to the miners and their illnesses.  Another genuine song, a romantic interlude that has little to do directly with miners, is “You + Me,” co-written by Willgoose and Lisa Jên Brown, the lead vocalist of the Welsh folk band 9Bach.  Brown warbles soothingly in Welsh, while Willgoose capably sings the English-language translation.  The sad, nostalgic epitaph for abandoned communities is “Mother of the Village”; now we are moving slowly and contemplatively as voices recall the bustle at the pits and in the town centers that is no more.  The album ends with one more song, “Take Me Home,” written by Rod Edwards and Roger Hand and performed by the Beaufort Male Choir of South Wales, a sort of balm for all the pain these places have suffered.        A

Sample song  “Turn No More”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd6Vffdou1c

SAMPHA, Process (Young Turks)—It is depressing how so many of today’s generation of black performers of what I consider genuine music (i.e., not hip-hop) are putting out regurgitated R&B.  Not Sampha (full name:  Sampha Sisay), whose voice I became familiar with through his association with acts like SBTRKT (see the 2011 and 2014 music surveys) and Jessie Ware; he is a true original.  He shows it right from the outset on Process with “Plastic 100°C.”  Not the first song in this survey to use astronaut imagery (see Odesza above), it takes atmosphere-level readings of issues relating to intimate domesticity.  It also touches on something deeply personal for the singer/songwriter, mentioning a lump in his throat he had discovered and wondered if it were benign.  The plaintiveness and urgency in Sampha’s voice are reinforced by the plucking of a lute-like instrument that could be a kora, although the only kora credit on the CD jacket is in the song “Kora Sings,” in which it is played by Josh Doughty.  Although the intricately complex five-minute song is about vulnerability, melting down in the face of another’s close scrutiny, its emotional soul baring gives it a tensile strength that makes it the standout on this record, rewarding repeated listenings.  Of the other nine tracks, the most affecting have a certain soulful simplicity of expression, namely, “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” and “Incomplete Kisses.”  As is the case with so many of the tracks here, both of these have a subtext about missing parents, particularly Sampha’s mother, who died of cancer not long ago.  So “Incomplete Kisses” operates on two levels:  romantically, in the “gather ye rose-buds while ye may” sense, and as the cry of a (now grown) child yearning for a mother who departed too soon.  Likewise, “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” is both about the artist’s introduction to music (“you [the piano] arrived when I was 3 years old”) and about the instrument as a stand-in for mum (“they said that it’s her time”).  Apart from one pensive bridge verse, the song sticks stubbornly to its chorus theme, but it is short enough that the lack of development is not a serious shortcoming.  Other songs move away from this sense of personal loss but are still confessional and deeply felt, whether the topic is fear out on the streets (“Blood on Me”) or mutual recriminations with a lover (“Reverse Faults,” moody with a droopy, attenuated synthesizer accompaniment) and the ensuing regret.  I would feel better about “Timmy’s Prayer” without knowing that it was co-written by Kanye West, given West’s recent idiocies in publicly supporting Donald Trump; the slow processional samples the opening theme (synthesized horn and percussion) of a song recorded by the R&B singer Timmy Thomas, “The Coldest Days of My Life” (1972).  Even so, it is affecting in its meditative, peculiar way; starting from the premise “if heaven’s a prison, then I am your prisoner,” the singer laments his release and that his return to the gates can only be as a visitor.  “Kora Sings” is one of the weaker tunes on the disc, in part because the title sets up expectations of the instrument in question playing a far more central role than it actually does.  I did not much like the tentative, fragmentary “Take Me Inside,” either, apart from its piano lead-in.  Still, the most questionable thing about this solid, promising debut is its forgettable title.    A-/B+

Sample song  “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NSuIYwBxu4

SLOWDIVE, Slowdive (Dead Oceans)—Understated, even reticent in a most English way, this five-member shoegaze/dream pop band from Reading, named for a Siouxsie and the Banshees song, had a run of several records in the 1990s (none of which I have heard) before disbanding.  Reunited in 2014 with the same lineup, it released its fourth, self-titled LP in 2017.  The revival album is not bad but underwhelming in places; there are certainly more impressive shoegaze bands around (Asobi Seksu, Kitchens of Distinction, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, to name a few).  The natural fuzziness of shoegaze makes the lyrics indistinct at times, which cries out for printed lyrics; however, the label declined to furnish the CD packaging with any, robbing the tunes of much of their intended meaning.  In some respects, at least superficially, this group mirrors the ballyhooed the xx (see the 2009 music survey):  they both feature a male and a female vocalist, singing in a breathy, sighing manner with flat affect, and each began touring and recording at a very young age, just emerging from teenagerhood.  But the comparison stops there; the xx is minimalist in tendency, whereas there is nothing minimalist about what Slowdive offers.  The best song is the final track, “Falling Ashes,” which is a departure from everything that came before it.  It puts forth an elemental arpeggiated piano ground bass, above which the voices etch a simple tune, with ghostly traces of other keyboards and guitar to add a bit of depth and richness.  It is limpid and sufficiently atmospheric in an Enoesque way, à la “Spider and I” (1977), to make Brian Eno himself proud.  Of the shoegazing pieces, the best is “No Longer Making Time,” which has the cleanest sound and the most straightforward melody; as it takes on volume and added instrumentation in the chorus, it throbs and throws off heat like nothing else on the disc.  “Star Roving” is breezy and upbeat, offering skimming pleasures that barely plumb beneath the surf.  In “Sugar for the Pill,” a countermelody gives an otherwise uninvolving tune the tune the pathos and distinctiveness it needs to flourish.  On too many of these songs, even the better ones, the chorus is just an extension, compositionally speaking, of the verse, which strikes me as lazy or unimaginative.  “Go Get It” starts off promisingly but seems stunted or truncated after the sung portion kicks in, a couple of minutes in, and a number of other tracks are too tentative, lacking the courage of their conviction.  Neil Halstead, the lead singer and primary songwriter, is no more than adequate as vocalist, a quavery and not always firmly supported tenor—think Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys with half the character and intensity.  Rachel Goswell does her best to harmonize with him.  On a hit-and-miss record, I would call the tally about even, but the misses register more decisively.    B+

Sample song  “Sugar for the Pill”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxwAPBxc0lU

STARS, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light (Last Gang Records)—Over the past few years, it has gradually become harder to get excited the way I used to on the occasion of a new release from Stars.  As the band members enter middle age (it really shows in the group photo portrait on the inside of the CD jacket), the music they are offering is genteel to a fault.  Stars songs, subtle in their artistry, have always taken some time and repeated listening to appreciate fully, and that is still the case.  But the band used to be more ballsy as well, and that aspect comes through on just one song on There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light.  Many of the others are simply unremarkable, musical set-piece minidramas we have come to expect from this band, where the stakes seem higher to the singers than to their less involved listeners.  The shining exception is “The Maze.”  This song starts with a piano motif that is unlike anything Stars has ever done, percussive, harmonically daring, and more than a little ominous.  As the tension in the verse reaches a snapping point, the normally reserved, English-born lead singer Torquil Campbell suddenly breaks into full-throated cry, “I fell into a dream!”  Suddenly, the rock star he has been suppressing for too long re-emerges.  It is a delicious moment.  Amy Millan, the other lead singer, harmonizes in a hooty voice behind him.  Following a second set of verse-chorus, the two harmonize together on the concluding verse, and then the song ends abruptly.  “On the Hills” is a song that grows on one through repeated listening, with Millan’s velvet soprano mining depths of yearning and regret in the dreamily affecting chorus (though the chorus’s extension somewhat dissipates the magic).  Another decent tune is “Hope Avenue,” an airy, relaxed number with a particularly plaintive refrain, though its bridge section is inert.  The opener, “Privilege,” issued as a single, is initially a light, sweet tune, with Millan singing the theme in a high register, which acquires more rock instrument heft as it progresses.  I have to wonder if the Montreal-based band might have had hockey in mind when it wrote “Wanderers”; an early Montreal pro hockey team carried that name, until its demise in the World War I era.  The song is really about restless youth, roaming the landscape, looking for trouble, making their parents fret.  It is characteristic of late-stage Stars compositions—elegant, restrained, graced with string-section accompaniment, but leaving just a shallow impression in passing.  Likewise with the quasi–title track, “Fluorescent Light”:  Campbell begins in an almost conspiratorial tone as he sets the stage; later, he is joined for the chorus by Millan, “Come out with me tonight/No one falls in love under fluorescent light,” sung with a vehemence that looks back toward the album In Our Bedroom after the War (see the 2007 music survey) without generating the same sense of catharsis.  Millan’s voice in her lower register, singing the bouncy refrain of “Real Thing,” suddenly bears an unfortunate, androgynous resemblance to that of New Edition’s lead singer, Ralph Tresvant, on “Cool It Now” (1984).  “The Gift of Love” is gelatinous and gooey, with chord progressions that are all too predictable.  As I concluded in reviewing No One Is Lost (see the 2014 music survey), Stars may need to reassess its career trajectory, perhaps work with others to reshape its sound, if it wants to keep fans interested.    B+

Sample song  “Privilege”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUAoB5WYdLA

SYLVAN ESSO, What Now (Loma Vista Recordings/ Concord Music Group)—More dance oriented than the group’s self-titled debut (see the 2014 music survey), What Now is groovier yet conventional, lacking the quirkiness and primitivism that characterized its predecessor.  The synthpop minimalism still bears an affinity to Matthew Herbert’s Scale (2006), if Amelia Meath’s earthy voice is closer to Norah Jones than to the jazzy inflections of Dani Siciliano, Herbert’s collaborator and erstwhile wife, so not all has changed by any means.  On “Radio,” one of the singles released prior to the full album, my thoughts went instead to another, better-known electropop outfit, LCD Soundsystem (see above).  Its bouncy bass tones in the synthesizers and tight-knit swinginess give it immediate appeal, even though the song’s chorus seems creatively underworked, and James Murphy’s LCD sarcasm is completely absent from the lyrics.  The song that follows it, “Kick Jump Twist,” starts off more sparely but soon moves into similar territory, both rhythmically and in terms of chord progressions.  The quasi-disco of LCD Soundsystem returns for “Just Dancing,” a turn I never would have expected of this duo (Meath on vocals and her partner/husband, Nicholas Sanborn, on keyboards) to take after the first record.  The words to the refrain of “Just Dancing” are shoehorned awkwardly into the musical meter, but no matter—Sylvan Esso is letting loose!  The multitracked vocals of the refrain in the midtempo “Signal” have a weirdly East Asian choral quality; the track is supposed to contain a sample of “The Logic of Color,” performed by Wye Oak, but I could not locate it.  The most interesting feature of the final tune, “Rewind” (before it settles into further springy synth tones) is its clattering percussion, but the combination of the quiet solo guitar and ghostly keyboard arpeggios with the vocals and that rattling percussion in the verse section has considerable charm.  The songs that sit closest to the debut album are the slower ones, most of all the opener, “Sound,” which takes its time bringing its simple vocal melody to fruition, starting as a buzz of production hum before clarifying.  Although this song is a mere sketch of an idea, it is also the most experimental track on the disc.  “Die Young” has a rhythmically stretchy character and a blue-ish tone to it, matching the semi-detached irony of its lyric.  “Slack Jaw” is quieter still, practically a cappella, so spare is the accompaniment, with an affectingly wistful quality to it.  With What Now, Sylvan Esso has beckoned toward accessibility (and, not coincidentally, a wider audience base), with all the attendant perils of sacrificing what made people pay attention in the first place.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Die Young”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-_NNIX8cDA

TEMPLES, Volcano (Heavenly Records/Fat Possum Records)—At its best, Temples can elicit comparisons to the Electric Light Orchestra, a personal favorite.  At its worst, the band from Kettering (the original one in England, not the one outside Dayton, Ohio) is akin to a Monkees knock-off (not to say that I dislike the Monkees)—which, given the Monkees’ made-for-television origin, is an exponential putdown.  On first listen, prompted by the enthusiasms of one Facebook friend, I was inclined to dismiss Volcano as pap.  I have not heard the foursome’s debut album, Sun Structures (2014), which is presumably more psychedelic in nature.  Its follow-up, though, is closer to unadulterated pop, bright and vaporous, like Air or Apples in Stereo more cotton candy than substance.  Also, I do not have much good to say about bandleader James Bagshaw’s voice, an androgynous tenor that frequently jumps into falsetto or near-falsetto range.  More studied listening sessions, however, prompted a partial revision of my first impressions.  This band does have a certain facility with pop hooks, granted, but it is also capable of throwing the unexpected your way, such as the abrupt rhythmic change at the chorus of the jaunty if cloying “All Join In.”  Further, Bagshaw and his writing partners, bassist Tom Walmsley and rhythm guitarist/synth player Adam Smith, know how to float some arresting chord arrangements and fabricate ornamentation that gives these pop/rock ditties some drive and dimension.  The artistry helps lift the middle section of the record above the commonplace.  “Born into the Sunset” brackets an ethereal melody with a bleary/screechy yet also swingy and insistently compelling keyboard figuration.  More than that, the song’s chorus extension introduces new coloration that brings fresh perspective to the tune.  If it were even darker, muddier, and more obscurantist in its lyrics, it could pass for Black Moth Super Rainbow, an American psychedelic outfit that used a similar song title, “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise” (see the 2009 music survey), rather than the Delays (another English pop/rock combo).  On another (astral) plane entirely is “How Would You Like to Go?” written by the keyboardist, Smith.  The song progresses at a leisurely enough clip that there is barely even a sense of motion; it is all sustained tones and broad chord changes, and yet the shifting chromaticism it displays is nothing short of brilliant.  “Open Air,” following another shrilly-frilly keyboard intro, moves much more briskly than anything else on the album.  More convincing as rhythmic groove than melody, it also becomes expansive and multihued upon reaching a plaintive refrain.  Following a bridge that the band did not seem to know what to do with (and hence goes nowhere) and an instrumental recapitulation of the theme, the song ends in sustained tones and reverb as Bagshaw summons back the refrain, laced by that keening keyboard part, once more very Delays-like.  Were the remainder of Volcano this good, it would earn a top mark; alas, there are just a few cleverly confected pop treats to supplement the middle of the tracklist.  “I Wanna Be Your Mirror,” with its Baroque keyboard-piping accompaniment at the outset and recurring throughout, comes off nicely even if it is a little too drawn out.  “Mystery of Pop” also has a sort of classically inspired keyboard accompaniment but cavorts to a faster beat, augmented by handclaps.  Appropriately oily and grimy, even cartoonish, in its slide guitar attacks is “Roman God-like Man,” which also sports an enjoyably pentatonic chorus.  Clearly, these four guys are too good at their craft to have issued such an uneven record, with the lesser efforts weighing down the whole.        B+

Sample song  “Certainty”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6zdVaAe0OE

THUNDERCAT, “Drunk” (Brainfeeder)—An excellent bass guitarist, Thundercat (Stephen Bruner) has been a major presence on the Los Angeles music scene since the turn of the millennium, when, still a teenager, he joined the punk/thrash band Suicidal Tendencies.  As a session musician, he has worked with artists spanning a wide range of genres:  jazz, soul, funk, rock, and hip-hop; he was a major contributor to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), and he has enjoyed a close working relationship with fellow Angeleno Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison; see the 2010, 2012, and 2014 music surveys).  “Drunk,” his third solo album, invites these close collaborators and several others, as well as mining the Isley Brothers’ catalog (drum sample) for “Them Changes,” which appeared previously on an EP.  Humorous and variegated yet uneven, it reaches back more than forward, toward a 1970s-style mellow spirituality and rapture, with cosmic overtones supplied via Rhodes piano and Hammond organ (presumably; the album credits are vague on the equipment used to play keys).  Thundercat is offering up a musical interpretation of the old maxim in vino veritas, revealing in twenty-three vignettes his innermost soul through the blurred vision of someone stumbling home from the pub at 3 a.m.  (In fact, there is a bluesy little number here called “3AM.”)  Certain tracks will burrow into your consciousness over time, for example, “The Turn Down,” featuring Pharrell (Williams), a brownout slow jam burbling with introspection and self-doubt.  “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II)” is similar in tonal coloration if not mood.  More benign and relaxed than “The Turn Down,” the song adopts a point of view hard to take entirely seriously (or at least literally), as the artist sings, “Everybody wants to be a cat….  I wish I was a cat (meow, meow, meow).”  Bouncing off that Isley Brothers beat, “Them Changes,” a song of romantic agony voiced by a character feeling that his heart has been ripped from his chest, evinces a funkiness typical of mid-seventies Stevie Wonder (on “I Wish,” say).  “DUI,” the final track, is a more elaborate working of the theme broached in the opening track, “Rabbot Ho,” a moody tune with a creatively wrenching chord progression and falsetto lyrics sung (as is the case on most of the record) by Thundercat himself.  He has likened the album to going down the rabbit hole, and its final word takes stock of what has gone before it, as “one more glass” is raised.  “Captain Stupido,” which follows “Rabbot Ho,” plays off that same chord sequence, for a much brisker song that is disheveled, disjointed, and ultimately silly, yet not entirely since its pathos merits a measure of respect even as the song entertains.  In a similar vein, “Jameel’s Space Ride” is wistful if slight, but it carries serious undertones regarding harassment of blacks who are doing nothing to raise suspicion by the police.  “Uh Uh,” as wordlessly inarticulate as its title would suggest, has the most virtuoso funk bass playing on the record.  Like “Them Changes,” the genially swingy “Bus in These Streets,” with its jangly percussion and artful, vaguely blue chromaticism, was written before the rest of “Drunk” was conceived.  “Friend Zone” also swings, with a heavy beat and kvetchy lyric; it is notable for the ominous keyboard chords that serve as its lead-in.  “Show You the Way” has garnered its share of attention (including on the Tonight Show on NBC) since it offers guest turns to Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, the former singing with his signature California-smooth blue-eyed soul honed through years with the Doobie Brothers, in a drowsy piece that, like “Rabbot Ho”/”DUI,” surprises with unanticipated chord progressions that still manage to be mellifluous.  What is not a surprise:  the entries I like the least on “Drunk” are the ones giving a platform to rappers.  “Walk On By” is actually yet another contemplatively bluesy track, until Lamar, the hipsters’ favorite hip-hop artist, comes along for a minute’s worth of noise pollution masquerading as poetry.  Far worse, however, is “Drink Dat”; Wiz Khalifa’s rap soliloquy is everything I hate about hip-hop:  in essence, he is telling his audience, “look at me and my bling and all the money I throw around, and if you’re jealous that I’m boasting about it, suck it!”  “Tokyo” crams in a lot of clichés about Japan in a wordy tune that pinballs hyperactively from pillar to post.  The album is packaged with a remix disc called “Drank,” by OG Ron C & the Chopstars in cooperation with Thundercat.  OG Ron C (a.k.a. Ronald Rummell Coleman) is a Houston record producer and D.J., and his Chopstars specialize in the Houston-born subgenre of hip-hop known as “chopped and screwed”:  music slowed down, with record scratching, skipped beats, etc.  OG Ron C serves as the M.C. for this disc, but it does Thundercat no real favors, homogenizing each piece into an indistinct sludge, with a serendipitous exception here and there, such as “The Turn Down,” which sounds decent at phenobarbital speed.  “Drank” is nothing if not thorough:  it does remix every single one of the twenty-three tracks, though in an entirely different order (except that “Rabbot Ho/Hoe” leads off both), and it even adds a brief throwaway track called “Weakstyle,” “remixing” something that was never mixed in the first place for the main disc.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Show You the Way” (featuring Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zdIGxOJ4M

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], Merge Records 2017 Spring Sampler (Merge Records)—Of this North Carolina label’s thirteen selections, the English Afro-funk outfit Ibibio Sound Machine’s boppy “Give Me a Reason,” from the album Uyai, sounds more than a little like Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (1979) but is no less fun for that.  Scotland’s Teenage Fanclub is represented by “I’m in Love,” from Here.  It is a fairly sedate tune with a refrain that grows on one over time, but it has a nonevent of a bridge (“bridge to nowhere”).  The Magnetic Fields has been around for quite some time now, and so has the song that is featured on the sampler, “100,000 Fireflies” (1991).  This is one of several entries on the sampler that are actually from L.P. reissues, which seems like cheating—not truly new music.  Still, Susan Anway’s vocals are sweet and the song more restrained than I recall of other early Magnetic Fields offerings.  Allison Crutchfield’s voice on “Dean’s Room” is less than wonderful, and the songwriting lacks sophistication; the best I can say for it is that it has a peppy rhythm section.  By contrast, though in the past I have been left cold by Mark Eitzel’s singing, he does a decent job with the slow number “An Answer” from his most recent solo album, Hey Mr Ferryman.  (He is also the lead singer of American Music Club.)  Coco Hames, who had led the garage-rock band the Ettes, has a very basic postpunk solo number, “I Don’t Wanna Go,” like a Joan Jett knockoff.  I do not care for the Mountain Goats’ folky, clomping, pseudo-British “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds.”  Nashville’s Lambchop (formerly known as Posterchild) is billed as an “alt-country” band, yet “The Daily Growl,” from another L.P. reissue, is surprisingly loungy (also a bit low in wattage).  The sampler CD is not improved by its inclusion of a charity single from Little Scream (Laurel Sprengelmeyer), “People,” in which the singer is by turns yowly, drowsy, and out of breath.  Perhaps the most bizarre cut on the sampler is The Music Tapes’ (a.k.a. Julian Koster of Elephant 6 and Neutral Milk Hotel) Judy Garland–esque “Where Evening’s Dream Goes,” from the E.P. The Orbiting Human Circus.  Other entries from Sneaks, Richard Buckner, and New Zealand’s own The Clean are unremarkable.        B-

Sample song  “Give Me a Reason” (Ibibio Sound Machine):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO769KQ_skE

THE WAR ON DRUGS, A Deeper Understanding (Atlantic Recording Corporation/ Warner Music Group)—The triumph of this record at the Grammy awards ceremony, winning best album honors for 2017, is indicative of how rock seems to have lost its way in an era when hip-hop, neo-soul, and American Idol-type pop predominate among the younger generation.  For my taste, A Deeper Understanding is a disappointing follow-up to the well-regarded Lost in the Dream (see the 2014 music survey), bloated, prolix, and lacking in direction and inspiration.  It starts promisingly enough, with “Up All Night,” which is as warm and engaging as anything on the previous album, if a little monotonous in its lack of development.  Oddly, much of A Deeper Understanding is written in such a way that there is no real distinction between verse and chorus; rather than an upending of conventional song structure, it gives the impression of inertia on the part of Adam Granduciel, the band’s leader and songwriter.  “Pain,” the second song, expressive of an idle wistfulness rather than true agony, bears some harmonic/countermelodic similarity to Al Stewart’s “The Year of the Cat” (1976), not the most flattering of comparisons by any means, though no one would mistake Granduciel’s raspy tenor for Stewart’s androgynous voice.  “Holding On” is more like one of Bruce Springsteen’s more jingly, upbeat offerings, shot through with plangent slide guitar.  There is an attempt in the intro to the downtempo “Knocked Down” to reach back toward the dreamier side of 1970s-era Philadelphia soul, replete with Mellotron and Wurlitzer, but the main theme’s harmonic doppelganger is, once more, unfortunate in its associations:  Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” (1984)—ugh!  A couple of the more anodyne songs gain strength from the band’s contributions toward the end:  the harmonica-led finale of the last selection, “You Don’t Have to Go,” is a flash of bluesiness à la Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home” (1979), while in “Strangest Thing,” the ultimate fleshing out of its guitar accompaniment far outshines the body of the tune.  “Thinking of a Place” is the record’s most protracted song, extending over eleven-plus minutes (thus accounting for about one-sixth of the album’s overall length).  Slow and written in a folk/Americana vein, with an early mention of “the Missouri River in the distance,” shimmery keyboard overtones, and pedal steel filigree, it is unusual in its composition.  The exposition lasts for several minutes, followed by an instrumental section that sounds as though it could conclude the piece but is mere interlude, tracing indolent guitar improvisations on the melody.  The restatement of the theme (this one actually has a distinct chorus) is followed by an extension/embroidering of the verse section, and finally a couple of more minutes of guitar/piano/chorus/harmonica musings on the same.  One of the more fully formed songs on the disc, it could nonetheless have been trimmed by at least a third.  The following track, “In Chains,” is not intended as a pendant or coda to “Thinking of a Place,” yet it is set in the same key, with a similar chord progression (though quicker tempo), which strikes me as a strategic mistake, or perhaps just laziness.  Granduciel’s voice eventually begins to wear on me; in the ballad “Clean Living,” what is meant as plaintive sounds simpering instead.  The lyrics are the album’s most exasperating feature:  meant to be confessional, they are navel gazing; intended to convey some deeper significance, rather, they are baffling and disjointed.  Grammy notwithstanding, this is a misfire.      B+/B

Sample song  “Pain”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9LgHNf2Qy0

ZOLA JESUS, Okovi (Sacred Bones Records)—Whereas Conatus (see the 2011 music survey) by Zola Jesus (Nika Roza Danilova, a.k.a. Nicole Hummel) was an album I described as pretentious but suggestive of intriguing possibilities, Okovi (a Slavic word for “shackles,” according to a Billboard interview) is more portentous and tendentious still, if not lacking in entertainment value, assuming the listener can get past all the goth melodrama.  Danilova is said to have written this, having retreated from the West Coast to the Wisconsin town of her upbringing, to combat her own feelings of depression, so not surprising that her lyrics are full of imagery of blood and bone, knives and stone.  These dark and primitive visions, inspired in part by black metal, should not be reflexively deemed profound simply because they are grim, penumbral, and opaque.  Certainly, the words are those of an internal psychodrama, with a particular meaning for the songwriter; to the rest of us, they seem solipsistic, disjointed, and messianic (the moniker Zola Jesus was not chosen at random).  For a far more relatable record about dealing with one’s inner demons, I would recommend Peter Gabriel’s Us (1992); for one that deals more convincingly with suicidal ideation, there are any number, which I will not bother to list.  In reviewing Conatus, I noted a certain kinship with Amy Lee and Evanescence, and that parallel is even more pronounced here, especially on “Ash to Bone.”  This is not necessarily a flattering comparison since Evanescence’s grandiosity, evidenced by massed strings and heroic poses, always outstripped its talent, yet its big hits were both catchy and cathartic.  “Catchy” is not a word I would use in the case of Zola Jesus, but the artist is seeking catharsis, even if that quest is attenuated by the album’s brevity and the choppiness and obscurity of the lyrics.  There is actually quite a lot of continuity from Conatus (the intervening album, Taiga, from 2014, I did not review).  Okovi begins in static, liturgical fashion, with the choral, solemn quasi-instrumental “Doma,” whose lyric seems autobiographical:  “Please take me home, where I can be one with the same land I’m from.”  Musically, it really hits its stride with the following piece, “Exhumed,” generating heat and drama from its alternately baleful and banshee cries and its drum volleys.  “Soak” is compelling musically as well, as a sort of grimly confessional dirge.  Its “take me to the water” refrain puts me in mind, naturally, of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” (1974); since the next line is “I am not free,” perhaps Danilova is viewing the baptismal rite as a form of shackling.  Meanwhile, the “born into debt” line echoes the Merle Travis folk song “16 Tons” (1946), as popularized by the Weavers.  Whether this lineage is conscious or accidental, I cannot say.  The album’s centerpiece arrives with “Witness,” as the narrator, to the accompaniment of heart-tugging strings, strives to keep a friend from doing himself/herself in.  It is at once tuneful, piercing, and too full of schmaltz not to elicit a snigger or two.  “Veka,” the longest song on the disc at just over five minutes, takes a while to get in gear, but once the percussion begins its trot into a leisurely instrumental intro, we are thrust into yet another piece with a somber but rousing melody, electrified by the high-tension wiriness of Danilova’s singing, paired with a sententious lyric about leaving a legacy before it is too late.  In both the opening and closing strains of this song, as well as in “Soak,” the spectral voices and disembodied percussion track seem to show that the artist has listened to Tori Amos, particularly her magisterial “Datura,” from To Venus and Back (1999), the pinnacle of Amos’s “power pop” phase.  “Remains,” the final song with words on the record, is tonally different from the others, querying rather than mired in glumness; with its glittery arpeggiated piano accompaniment, by contrast, it seems positively uplifting (though the lyric is not), which appears to have been the intent.  The closing instrumental, “Half Life,” echoes the opener to some degree, although there is a greater sense of motion and less one of sitting in a pew on a Sunday.  Compositionally, it is hard to find fault with Okovi, even if certain tracks (“Siphon” and “Wiseblood,” the latter with its nyeah-nyeah singsong quality vitiating the potential of its chorus) fall short of the standard.  Still, the whole personal-journey-through-the-dark-side-to-come-out-with-a-deeper-understanding thing is overly schematic and freighted with self-importance, to a degree the album cannot carry off.    B+

Sample song  “Exhumed”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKmrgTlfdx8