MUSIC 2019:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield

May 16, 2020

GENERAL COMMENTS

     What can one say about a year in which the Grammys chose Dua Lipa as best new artist and Duncan Laurence’s “Arcade” won the Eurovision Song Contest for the Netherlands (sigh)?  At least neither of these is the sort of purest bubblegum pop that has been in fashion for a number of years, but their newfound prominence seems to confirm that good looks are prized over genuine talent, certainly over artistic daring.  Because I spent so much of 2019 just trying to catch up on 2018, any pronouncement I make on the year in music ought to be regarded as suspect.  The trends, though, continue to give little reason for encouragement, as today’s youth reflexively stream everything, leaving actual recorded music to languish, and Amazon.com continues to destroy retail outlets right and left.  The current pandemic crisis will land the coup de grâce for even more of these; impossible to predict what will be left of the record-store landscape after it recedes.  The pandemic did have a silver lining in the sense that, by forcing me to stay home more than I might have otherwise, it induced me to finish the music survey in a somewhat more timely, if still tardy, fashion.

Dua Lipa

      The year just past was not a big one for me in terms of seeing live performances.  Among the sparse highlights were seeing David Byrne’s musical American Utopia on Broadway in December—like a Talking Heads concert without the rest of the Talking Heads but plus Mauro Refosco and a number of other musical friends and professionals, at Broadway ticket prices.  In June, we saw Tortoise perform its album TNT (1998) all the way through at Celebrate Brooklyn! in Prospect Park.  In the spring, we were in Perast, Montenegro, and our final day there was Perast Day, celebrating a centuries-old Venetian triumph over the Ottoman Turks.  The day’s revelries ended with a delightful evening concert by a men’s choral group.  We could not understand the words sung generally, but the refrain of the encore, “in vino veritas,” was clear enough.

      Notable passings in the world of music in 2019 included, from the classical and opera sphere, Mariss Jansons, Jessye Norman, Franco Zeffirelli, André Previn, Christopher Rouse, Dominick Argento, Anner Bylsma, Marcello Giordani, and Paul Badura-Skoda.  From the Broadway stage, we lost Jerry Herman and Stanley Donen.  And from pop and jazz:  Ginger Baker, Ric Ocasek, Eddie Money, Leon Redbone, Scott Walker, Johnny Clegg, João Gilberto, Dr. John, Art Neville, Dick Dale, Dave Bartholomew, the Silver Jews’ David Berman, Peter Tork of the Monkees, Daryl Dragon (a.k.a. “The Captain” from the Captain and Tennille), Nipsey Hussle, and Juice WRLD.  Not least of all, there was Neil Innes, composer of soundtracks to our favorite Monty Python movies and co-creator of the Rutles, and Michel Legrand, who composed the Umbrellas of Cherbourg soundtrack and much more.

      While I was drawing from a smaller pool of pop and rock records (just 20) in 2019 than in any year since I began putting this survey out publicly via Blogger in 2007, I believe I chose well.  Following several years in which the pickings were depressingly meager, there were a lot of strong contenders for Album of the Year, and not necessarily from the biggest names in the survey, either.  I do draw some encouragement from knowing that, even as pop seemingly reaches a fresh nadir annually and cultural literacy and historical memory continue to shrivel, there are still artists out there dedicated to pursuing what is worthwhile, for the love of music.

      My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2019, and to my partner, Melissa, for her encouragement.  This year, 2020, at least, she will not have to endure my holing up in the basement on New Year’s Eve, practically up to the ball drop from Times Square, finishing up this thing.

      Album of the Year honors go to Kit Sebastian—the duo of Kit Martin and Merve Erdem—for Mantra Moderne, an eclectic but unmistakably European weave of influences from around the globe that also draws on late 1960s and early 1970s rock and psychedelia for inspiration yet has a strong enough genetic imprint of its own that it never comes across as pastiche.  It is a charming and remarkably sophisticated and self-assured debut, and yet, it had vigorous competition:  I could have named any of several other records as the year’s champion and have felt equally justified—kudos to Elbow, FKA Twigs, and Matmos for putting out discs that are provocative, powerful, and entertaining.  Nilüfer Yanya’s debut was also strikingly impressive.  It is reflective of my general disposition toward American pop these days that almost nothing on the honorable mention slate below comes from the United States.  Matmos is two Americans, but they are experimentalist outliers with a cult, progressive-radio fan base.  The neoclassical A Winged Victory for the Sullen also consists of an American pair, but both base themselves in Europe these days.

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

1.      Kit Sebastian, Mantra Moderne
2.      Elbow, Giants of All Sizes
3.      FKA Twigs, Magdalene
4.      Matmos, Plastic Anniversary
5.      A Winged Victory for the Sullen, The Undivided Five
6.      Nilüfer Yanya, Miss Universe
7.      Weval, The Weight
8.      Pond, Tasmania
9.      Alcest, Spiritual Instinct
10.    Boogarins, Sombrou Dúvida
11.    Opeth, In Cauda Venenum
12.    Floating Points, Crush



      ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

KIT SEBASTIAN, Mantra Moderne (Mr Bongo)—It is a tribute to the compositional skill of Kit Martin, the young Englishman who is 50 percent of the duo Kit Sebastian, that Mantra Moderne seamlessly weaves Turkish and Middle Eastern influences as well as others into its gorgeous pop fabric.  One would not expect an album that can be fairly described as incorporating elements of psychedelia, Anatolian folk, Brazilian rhythms, French yé-yé music, and the louche, swingy pop of 1960s London to work at all, yet here it is, a delightful bag of magic tricks.  I know nothing about Martin apart from what the record label (Mr Bongo) has provided:  he is something of a prodigy, having had a band of one kind or another since age twelve and having released his first L.P. at age fifteen.  He attended the famed Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and he now divides his time between London and France, where the record was recorded (Poitiers).  All the music on Mantra Moderne is credited to Martin, and on the “A” side of the L.P. (I have the CD format), all the lyrics as well.  Of course, half the Kit Sebastian sky is held up by his musical partner, Merve Erdem, singer, lyricist, and perhaps Martin’s muse.  She was born in Istanbul, studied film in Rome, bases herself in London today, and is responsible for the videos associated with the band as well.  With the exception of one English-language song co-written with Martin (“With a Sense of Grace”), she wrote all the lyrics on the album’s “B” side, entirely in her native Turkish.  Although English translations are provided in the insert, this will necessarily limit the record’s reach in a parochial society that cannot be bothered with subtitles, etc.  That the lyrics are not particularly arresting or penetrating matters little when the music is this good.  The very name “Kit Sebastian” is a mystery—the first half is obvious enough, but the second … a tribute to John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song?  Who knows?  In any case, if I have managed, with the tiny reach of my blog, to make any new Limiñanas fans (see the 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2017 music surveys), those listeners will quickly latch onto the similarities here:  often, it sounds like music to ride Vespas by, or to chain-smoke French cigarettes, or to watch Jean-Pierre Léaud in black and white on the big screen.  Aside from backing vocals, Kit Martin sings only on the opening song, “Senden Başka” (Other than You), yet he does so in a sort of Lionel Limiñana gruff monotone.  That would place Merve Erdem in the Marie Limiñana role, although the former is a much more capable and versatile singer.  Incidentally, “Senden Başka” is the one song where I dislike the manner in which she delivers the melody.  Her Turkish-language refrain is the despairing (or resigned) response to Martin’s romantically dire, English-language verse.  Although the song sounds suitably yé-yé, swingy and sexy (if with smoldering psychedelic overtones), Martin embellishes the piece with passages of very Turkish string filigree.  The CD packaging contains no information about instrumentation; in the video for the slow, sensual, lushly arranged “Kuytu” (Hidden), one can see Martin playing conventional keyboards and at various points strumming a mandolin-like lute.  At the beginning of the title track, which succeeds “Senden Başka,” one hears—what?  Turkish bagpipes?  A crumhorn, perhaps?  Something woodwind-ish with a sour tone, before the song relaunches as a slow, decadent groove worthy of Pizzicato Five (a Japanese band that itself beckoned toward sixties Anglo-American and French pop).  Even more Limiñanas-like than the opener is “Tyranny 20,” with its psychedelic guitar and buzzy undertones.  Nodding to the demagoguery present in today’s politics, it contains the album’s most pointed lyric:  “Now the Gods and pop stars/Enslave man ruled by tsars/Charles the Great, urinate/I’m in love with the Soviet state.”  “Yanimda Kal” (Stay with Me) is the fulcrum of the Brazilian influences, prevalent throughout the tune, though “Pangea,” “Durma” (Don’t Stop), and “Yürüdüm Büyüdüm Çürüdüm” (I Walked, I Grew Old, I Rotted) also have the cuíca and other tropical percussion.  The main theme of “Pangea” smacks of the Troggs or the Zombies, even if those British 1960s bands never, to my knowledge, overlaid their melodies with Near Eastern strings or horns.  As bossa nova as “Yanimda Kal” is in its guitar and percussion ostinato, its overall flavor is still very much Anatolian, in terms of both modality and instrumentation.  “With a Sense of Grace” has the most broadly conventional pop sheen of any number on the disc; it is a bit too slow-paced and schmaltzy for its own good but a guilty pleasure all the same.  The smoky groove that concludes the record, “Durma,” is a miniature tour de force, a Dizzy Gillespie fever dream of modal jazz crossed with, say, Romania’s Fanfare Ciocărlia (see the 2007 music survey) or another Balkan brass outfit, with bits of krautrock and Stereolab tossed in for good measure.  The end product is as appealing as it is highly original.  Just thirty-seven minutes in length, Mantra Moderne left me longing to hear more from these two.    A

Sample song  “Kuytu” (Hidden):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJPKFvfpVd8


      And the rest . . .

ALCEST, Spiritual Instinct (Nuclear Blast Records)—I did not much care for Alcest’s brief foray into “pure” (not sure that word is appropriate) shoegaze, Shelter (see the 2014 music survey).  After that, with Kodama (2016), which I did not review, Neige (Stéphane Paut) and his percussionist partner Winterhalter (Jean Deflandre) moved closer to their roots in black metal.  In fact, many credit the French band with originating a hybrid genre now known as “blackgaze.”  Naturally, Alcest and its followers have been disowned by true black metal believers for the heresy of being more accessible and less extreme, but enough of that.  The essence is that the harder and more acute sounds of Spiritual Instinct better suit the group than those on Shelter.  There are just six long-ish songs on the record.  Lyrics are hard to decipher, and the label provided no printed ones, but it is really about the music itself more than Neige’s singing.  Each song includes some sections in which he screams, Bob Mould–style (true to his black metal origins), for which I do not care, but these are usually partially covered by loud orchestration and therefore not as assaultive as they might be otherwise.  “Les Jardins de Minuit” (Gardens of Midnight), the opener, is compositionally strong, starting with foreboding long tones and a wailing theme in the electric guitar that is then recapitulated vocally before a fast volley of guitar chords really gets the action going.  The thrumming bass of this song will echo in your ears for some time after it ends.  The next number up, “Protection,” is an equally compelling listen, slower in its tempos, with a melody more fully developed than that of the primitive “Jardins” yet cut from the same cloth in terms of key, timbre, and apocalyptic Sturm und Drang.  “Sapphire” is less intense but also dragged down somewhat by a pallid main theme.  “L’Île des Morts” (Isle of the Dead) is similarly burdened by a less than stirring melody, though in this case it is less central to a song that contains far more in the way of instrumental sonic exploration (it is the longest track), finding its full extraterrestrial flowering beyond the halfway point, once the guitars and drums have dropped any pretense of attempting to embroider or reiterate the original theme.  The pounding, midtempo “Le Miroir” (The Mirror) successfully recreates the sensation of dread missing from the middle of the tracklist, its icy beauty and exigency emanating not so much from the colorless principal melody but from its harmonic accompaniment, ending with a quieter, if still restive, guitar coda.  The album concludes with its titular track, which has more of the chiming guitar chords typical of shoegaze but also its share of guitar churn and reverb, and ferocious percussion, eventually abandoning its gently swaying 6/8 for a more standard, four-on-the-floor rhythm.  The sung passages on Spiritual Instinct are lukewarm, and the shouted segments are overkill, but otherwise the music has a fundamental integrity in its brooding disposition, and it rocks powerfully with a sharp edge to its gleaming metal.        A-

Sample song  “Protection”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn7wvu8R4Wk

BAT FOR LASHES, Lost Girls (AWAL Recordings)—In a number of respects, the songs on Lost Girls are cut from the same fabric as those on The Bride (see the 2016 music survey), which won my album of the year honors.  Natasha Khan’s songwriting as Bat for Lashes is, even at its most daring, consonant and accessible; there is a certain warbly mellifluousness to the most bitter or troubled passages.  This only serves to show how fine a margin there can be between inspiration and dreck.  The Bride was a concept record, a pop song cycle full of intensity and vulnerability as it moved through the stages of grief from shock to anger, sorrow to a resolve to move forward.  Lost Girls seems, in contrast, well, lost.  Not to say that every album needs an overarching theme to unify its tracklist, but one with a title like this raises expectations of stories about young women who either run into or court trouble and how they navigate such perils.  Instead, we are fed one cloying fantasia after another.  It does not help matters that Khan’s true creative voice is diluted by her having paired with a couple of Los Angeles producers—she was going for a more cinematic feel—for most of the tunes.  Jenn Decilveo has written and produced for an array of pop and indie rock acts over the past decade; the three songs here for which she partners are among the weakest.  “Feel for You” could be thought of as a denatured version (though not intentionally) of the similarly titled 1979 Prince song, popularized by Chaka Khan in 1984; it is a dance number with a “jungly” programmed percussion track and a stunted, never-changing melody.  “Peach Sky” is bland and dispensable, littered with vapid arpeggios, obvious bass (synthesized—most of these songs have no guitar at all) chord progressions, and shimmery effects.  Somewhat more touching and interesting in its arrangements, “Desert Man” nonetheless suffers many of the same faults and Harlequin romance tendencies as “Peach Sky.”  I could find little information about Khan’s other associate, Charles Leslie Scott, a.k.a. Charles Scott IV, other than that the bulk of his career has involved acting as music supervisor on the soundtracks to various movies as well as television series.  He, at least, coauthored the record’s best selection, “The Hunger.”  For one song, Khan manages to recapture the pathos and mystique that carried her through the previous album.  The baroque/funereal organ chords, thrumming bass (actual guitar this time, played by Scott), and Khan’s own quavery voice, tentatively rising at the end of each phrase and given a fillip of artistic pedigree from the backing vocals of Julianna Barwick, combine to create a sense of foreboding that is absent, and sorely missed, elsewhere.  Some strands of this fairy dust are carried forward into “Jasmine,” whose buzzy, new wave–y arrangements, full of reverb and crisp woodblock/cowbell beats, transport the listener back to the heyday of Talk Talk or the Thompson Twins.  But the lyric is cluttered with Hollywood clichés (“legs for days”; “the hands of a killer”).  More retro, Thompson Twins–style fodder, with stretchy beats and synths programmed to sound like xylophones, is offered on “So Good.”  Although the shift from minor mode in the verse to major in the chorus holds a certain appeal, the refrain smacks a bit too much of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go” (1979), not to mention its unacknowledged filching of the phrase “hurt so good” from John “Cougar” Mellencamp (1982), who in turn was playing off of Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Hurt So Bad” from the mid-sixties.  The album’s one instrumental (“Vampires”) aside, that leaves the two songs Khan wrote on her own.  While “Safe Tonight” and “Mountains” both have a dreamy aura and are sweetly romantic—and few voices in pop today are creamier and more emollient than hers—neither really makes a case for repeated play.  There is so much more the artist could have done with the idea of Lost Girls; it feels as though she sidestepped the grit, the sweat, the trauma, the exhilaration of breaking free.  In other words, the tough reckoning with problems that might have made for a meaningful artistic statement was bypassed in favor of ethereal pop and its easy tropes.  Pity.    B+/B

Sample song  “The Hunger”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrgesVaWIAU

BATTLES, Juice B Crypts (Warp Records)—First, Tyondai Braxton left Battles, and I was OK with that because, although it is hard to imagine the album Mirrored (see the 2007 music survey) without him, his cartoonish vocals did seem extraneous to the group’s mission statement.  Now Dave Konopka, the bass guitarist, is gone as well, leaving the “band” an odd duo:  Ian Williams on guitars and keyboards, John Stanier on drums.  Battles has been, if far from prolific, commendably steady in its production, issuing an album every four years.  And while it never caught fire with “the youth,” it has earned the respect of fellow musicians, enough so that Gloss Drop, which won my Album of the Year honors (see the 2011 music survey), was remixed by other artists the following year as Dross Glop.  The impulse to seek out different voices continues; one might imagine Williams and Stanier quickly tiring of having just each other for company and inspiration.  Half the tracks on the bizarrely titled Juice B Crypts feature guest artists, some more obscure than others.  I had to look up who Sal Principato is—he was the vocalist for the early eighties New York no wave band Liquid Liquid, best known for having had the bass groove for its song “Cavern” appropriated for the early hip-hop hit “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” by Melle Mel.  Anyway, his appearance in “Titanium 2 Step” is most successful in large part because it is fairly unobtrusive, leaving the band to do its thing freely.  This is a song in which the rhythmic accents are platinum (not titanium, which is far less dense) heavy.  Williams and Stanier work the same punchy riff, with slight variations, obsessively, while Principato’s high-energy, exclamatory delivery gives the impression that four decades have not aged him at all.  I have always been a huge Yes fan, and so it is nice to hear Jon Anderson’s voice on “Sugarfoot,” but I cannot say much for the song itself.  It begins with a spacy spoken-word (presumably, Mandarin) performance by Prairie WWWW, which, per Bandcamp, is “an experimental folk band [from] Taipei” and devolves into a beepy, percolating accompaniment to Anderson’s dreamy, descending-scale vocal that sounds as though it could be an outtake from the Yes record 90125 (1983).  Two adjacent tracks form a continuum, “A Loop So Nice…” and “They Played It Twice.”  The first part is an instrumental, whereas the second spotlights Xenia Rubinos, a Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter who appeared in a Lincoln Center Out of Doors showcase of Latin alternative acts several years back.  The “loop” is a busy, effervescent, fast shuffle that gets lost at the outset of “They Played It Twice”—the first minute is a stop-time interval of stridently declamatory, bluesy singing from Rubinos and shrill, zoomy keyboard electronics from Williams.  When the loop resumes, Rubinos’s singing is more smoothly integrated into its texture and Stanier’s percussion is more thundering.  The other two songs with words share the soundstage with performers I have never liked:  the hipsters’ favorite rappers Shabazz Palaces (Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire, on “Izm”) and the self-consciously arty Tune-Yards (Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, on “The Last Supper on Shasta”).  “The Last Supper on Shasta” is the album’s longest track, proceeding as an instrumental well after Merrill Garbus’s voice fades out; following some furious improvisations on the original theme, it reduces to a solo piano line that ends with the same figuration that began the album, on the composition “Ambulance.”  “Ambulance,” however, uses electronic keyboards and steadily gathers momentum following that intro, reaching a head of steam when the full drum kit is unleashed to back a set of furious guitar syncopations.  “Fort Greene Park,” by contrast, is largely placid and bubbly, though it does have a rock-ribbed middle section, and when the original theme returns, it is stretchier and more resounding.  Clearly, Battles is at its best when its musicians are locked in dialogue, bouncing ideas off each other.  With Konopka gone, that is happening less, as are the intervals when the music truly soars.    B+

Sample song  “Fort Greene Park”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P-VKUTp6qE

BLACK MIDI, Schlagenheim (Rough Trade Records)—It never gives me a keen sense of satisfaction to declare that the best thing about an album is a music video.  (The worst thing is the packaging:  needlessly slim, hard-to-prise-open jewel box, with printed lyrics packaged outside it since there is no room inside.)  The imaginative and visually arresting video for “Ducter,” the defiantly paranoid final song on Black Midi’s Schlagenheim (see the link below) far outpaces any of the music.  Schlagenheim, which roughly translates from German as “home of the beat,” is noise rock, but unlike noise rock I have praised previously (see Sleigh Bells in the 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2016 music surveys), this will set your teeth to gnawing your epidermis without offering sufficient artistic justification for doing so.  From the start, I found Geordie Greep’s vocal delivery off-putting, the precise enunciating characteristic of the late Mark E. Smith filtered through the higher-pitched, pinched stylizations of a nerdy art student.  There are positive aspects to this record as well, though.  The opening track, “953” (no idea what is the significance of that number), actually seems to take King Crimson as one of its inspirations; the cacophonous assault at the end of “21st Century Schizoid Man” (1969), pierced by a screeching guitar tone, is evoked repeatedly.  The endless reiteration of the same guitar pattern would be tiresome, but the band does at least play around with its tempo.  There are also pretty passages of quiet acoustic guitar.  In fact, I would look favorably on this song were not the central sung portion so irksome.  You might think a song titled “Speedway” would be fast, but this one is taken at a very deliberate tempo.  In its monomaniacally minimalist hashing of one guitar chord (sometimes with a grace note attached!), it is about as tedious an exercise as driving a car around an oval 200 times.  At least Cameron Picton’s subdued recitation (no real singing) of the lyric is less grating.  This obsessively repetitive tendency reaches its nadir with “BMBMBM,” truly one of the decade’s most irritating songs.  By the time the tracklist gets to “Reggae,” one no longer expects anything even remotely Jamaican, and one would be correct—just some interesting guitar passagework spoiled by another wordy, bizarre lyric (“He’s got a coat of nine tails and fresh leather shoes, straight from the cow I tell you!”).  Much the same can be said for “Near DT, MI,” with its oblique, angry references to the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.  The most interesting stew of guitar noise and distortion takes place on the near–title track, “Of Schlagenheim,” once more degraded by dopey verse (“I dream of a woman with the teeth of a raven and the hands of a porcupine”).  This and the relatively subdued “Western,” which contains, at the beginning and end of the tune, extended quasi-folky sections of acoustic guitar and voice, even banjo, à la Led Zeppelin II (1969) in its quieter moments, are, along with “Ducter,” the longest tracks.  Greep’s vocals on “Ducter” range from trancelike to hysterical yelps.  Some might make the case that these intensify the ponderous guitar/percussion climaxes that punctuate the song’s meditative core; to me, they are a distraction.  Black Midi (itself named for a specialized genre of Japanese origin, black MIDI) shows some sparks of genuine creativity on Schlagenheim, but they are too dispersed amid a mechanistic matrix, and those harpy-ish vocals hardly invite reconsideration of the music.        B/B-

Sample song  “Ducter”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86NGJmUfRlM

BOOGARINS, Sombrou Dúvida (Overseas Artists Recordings)—The Seattle radio station KEXP was a big promoter of this Brazilian group (from Goiânia, in the center of the country), which derives its odd name from a type of jasmine flower, in 2019.  The group, whose songwriting core is boyhood friends Dinho Almeida (vocals and rhythm guitar) and Benke Ferraz (lead guitar), takes its primary influences from Western and Brazilian psychedelia and the overlapping Tropicália movement of the late 1960s, particularly Caetano Veloso and Os Mutantes.  However, one can also hear, in the more languid “A Tradição” (Tradition), some of the flavors and relaxed sensuality of the bossa nova, even though this song lacks the classic, shuffling bossa nova rhythm.  Almeida’s high tenor is far from sexy, an acquired taste to be sure.  Off-putting vocals aside, the compositions are generally effective and engaging, with lyrics that are (perhaps) less overtly political than the band’s earlier work (with which I am admittedly unfamiliar) and decidedly less so than their musical forebears.  The opening track, “As Chances” (The Chances), is a strong beginning, dreamily seductive, with the pensive lyric set against swooning synthesizer and rueful guitar chords.  The title track (translating as “Shadow or Doubt”) that follows is a little less compelling yet still features some impressive guitar work from Ferraz amid heavy rhythmic accents.  “Desandar” (Backtrack) is the most beautifully melodic and reflective composition on the disc, mellowed without losing its dynamism.  “Dislexia ou Transe” (Dyslexia or Trance) draws its strength from the psychedelia-heady opening guitar sequence, including ten-string guitar from guest performer Pedro Bonifrate, who also sings, an intro that would be right at home on a record by the Limiñanas (see the 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2018 music surveys); otherwise, the song is a cipher.  “Nós,” whose title is a play on words (it can mean either “we/us” or “knots”), is appropriately twisty, sonically blurry and tonally distorted in a wrenching manner, ending with a sampling or synthetic re-creation of an older keyboard melody borrowed from who knows where.  Unlike “A Tradição,” which tends to lose its way in adding a second, more intense section that violates the spirit of the first, “Tardança” (Delay) keeps things simple, with an ingratiating melody and a ruminative bridge that never strays far from the tune’s tight containment field.  “Invenção” (Invention) is a more pallid rehashing of the thematic concepts explored on “As Chances,” and the final two tracks, the insipid “Te Quero Longe” (I Want You Far Away) and the hollowly chiming “Passeio” (Outing), dampen the spirit.  Still, notwithstanding the album’s defects and an amiable nature that is more trifling than Tropicália, Sombrou Dúvida has charm to spare.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Sombra ou Dúvida”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-egLTT2cnCk

DANDY WARHOLS, Why You So Crazy (Dine Alone Records)—I tend to cut the Dandy Warhols considerable slack because they are droll and fun and have been for years.  They are less deserving of such charity for Why You So Crazy.  There are a few songs that are up to snuff, but a good portion of the record seems to be the band on autopilot.  Hackneyed phrases like “get me to the church on time,” which has been around since the musical My Fair Lady (1956), “I don’t know but I’ve been told/streets of heaven are paved with gold,” or “sticks and stones will break my bones/talk about me when I’m dead and gone” crop up.  Every third song or so draws inspiration from the vast music library of Americana, yet a computer or a capuchin monkey could have devised most of them, as colorless and unoriginal as they are.  The exception is “Motor City Steel,” in which lead singer Courtney Taylor (who continues to style himself as “Courtney Taylor Taylor”) relates an amusing tale in a faux-country drawl (referring to Paris’s primary airport as “Charlie DU-gal”).  Even here, the music is rote, if relentlessly peppy for a story about a breakup, like a jingle in search of a commercial sponsor, which it might yet get.  “Small Town Girls” lacks the cleverness of Graham Parker’s “Local Girls” (1979), and its principal theme is practically a mirror image of that “Da Da Da” song (1982) by the German group Trio.  A pastiche of religious revivalism, “Sins Are Forgiven” is about as unironic as Kanye West in Jesus Is King (2019) mode, set to another terribly obvious, trite little melody.  Zia McCabe, the band’s customary keyboard player, wrote and sings (not terribly well) on “Highlife,” covering her own alter-ego (hillbilly) band, Brush Prairie, another simplistically singsong, ersatz country tune, complete with pedal steel and whoops and a guitar bridge that could have been filched from the Commander Cody version of “Hot Rod Lincoln” from the early seventies.  These songs are just a waste of time.  Because the Dandies do few interviews since the documentary Dig! (about them and another West Coast band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre) in 2003, it is not clear how the opening ditty, “Fred and Ginger,” was constructed in the bowels of the Odditorium, the group’s Portland clubhouse and studio.  But the backing track, designed to emulate a Victrola playing a dance tune from perhaps the 1940s, is strikingly similar to the one Steve Hackett conjured for “Sentimental Institution” (1980), using a device called an Optigan to play a “Big Band Beat” optical disc.  Whereas “Sentimental Institution” is a real, if throwback, tune, however, “Fred and Ginger” is a cipher.  The Dandies are best when they sound like their old selves.  The mellow cloud of psychedelic haze surrounding “Next Thing I Know,” the grimy, gurgling/squeaky ground bass underlying the uncharacteristically solemn “To the Church,” the futuristic, Krautrock-influenced “Terraform,” with its stretchy, synthetic beats and otherworldly melodica—these are hardly buried treasure but have the easygoing, euphoric grooves and cunning touches that we have come to expect from the band.  “Forever,” with Thomas Lauderdale making a guest appearance tickling the ivories (saloon style), is another unusually grave number, a clomping goth minidrama, yet well constructed and stirring in spite of the cliché about streets of heaven paved with gold.  It is second only to “Be Alright,” which is the Dandy Warhols as I have known and loved them previously, an upbeat, blissed-out/druggy tune with a piano lead-in (and recurring motif) played exclusively on the tinkly notes to the far right of the keyboard, plus handclaps and plenty of burbling bass and amplifier hum.  Why the band chose to end the album with a recital of a Debussy piano prelude, “Ondine,” is a mystery to me.  It is entirely out of place here, and the pianist, Hunter Noak, is unknown.  Perhaps Taylor had a friend he wanted to do a favor for by giving him some exposure.  Debussy’s prelude is beautiful, of course, but the weird thing is that some of the bass hum from the prior song (“Forever”) carries over well into the second minute.  My unprofessional opinion is that Noak plays with pretty good technical facility, but his performance lacks the subtlety that more accomplished soloists bring to this piece.  It might be unfair to accuse the Dandy Warhols of laziness—middle age and family responsibilities mean that the members cannot devote their all to the project as they once did—but far too much of Why You So Crazy is content simply to coast along.        B+/B

Sample song  “Be Alright”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5VnoPACDWw

ELBOW, Giants of All Sizes (Polydor Records)—Shades of Coldplay, even of Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN), stalk this majestic record.  More than anything, though, I hear strains of the Moody Blues throughout.  Guy Garvey, the lead singer and lyricist for Elbow, grew up an admirer of the early Genesis and Peter Gabriel, so the progressive rock influence on Giants of All Sizes is natural.  The strings of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra add symphonic heft to the record’s standout song, “White Noise White Heat.”  This is one of my contenders for song of the year.  Supposedly about the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 in London, there is nothing in the lyrics specific to that disaster.  Even so, the opening stanza crackles with smoldering rage:  “I was born with a trust/That didn’t survive/The white noise and the lies/The white heat of injustice has taken my eyes/I just wanna get high.”  The title also evokes Don DeLillo’s breakthrough 1985 novel (which I have yet to read) White Noise.  The opening chords, backed by a floating chorus, are particularly Moody Blues–esque.  The verses brood eloquently against a persistent hum; the power chords anchoring the refrain quoted above pull the song forcefully back to earth.  The other two tracks released as singles, “Dexter & Sinister” and “Empires,” make reference to the divisions among Britons regarding the Brexit debate and the consequences for the European Union, respectively, obliquely enough that one would never guess just by examining the lyrics sheet.  However, the verse “Unstuck and the whole archipelago is/Rocking like a suicide pedalo at high tide” from “Dexter & Sinister,” the opener, signal the country’s grim predicament.  That song’s main theme, while not as anthemic as “White Noise White Heat,” galumphs along on buzzy synthesizer tones supporting a verse with grandiosely apocalyptic visions, tempered by bittersweet piano intervals and sour guitar accents.  Four and a half minutes into a seven-minute composition, the rhythm and tone change abruptly, becoming sunny and ethereal, with the American singer Jesca Hoop’s voice riding soothingly above the guitar play, in much the way that “The Great Gig in the Sky” (Clare Torry on the vocal) flows directly from the foreboding “Time” on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973).  “Empires” is slower and mellower, if resigned and despondent, oscillating improbably between Coldplay crooning and Moody Blues, “Tuesday Afternoon” (1967) mode (the song’s mention of a “dismally typical Tuesday/Delivering blues with lead in its canopy” is unlikely coincidental).  Garvey is most like Chris Martin of Coldplay when in ballad mode, as in the sweetly lyrical benediction “Weightless” or in “My Trouble,” a gently consonant number in pastel hues dedicated to the singer’s wife, the actress Rachael Stirling, or upon launching into falsetto, as on the dreamy, pretty, poetic “Seven Veils,” though Elbow is mining a richer vein of emotion than I have heard on any Coldplay tune.  The vocal harmonies in “On Deronda Road,” supplied by the Plumedores and Nathan Sudders, and acoustic guitar accompaniment hark back to CSN’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (1969), set to the sparest lyric on the album, just four lines of verse, forming a single vignette of domestic contentment.  “Doldrums,” a kind of inebriated waltz, strikes me as a bit unfair, taking a sarcastic view toward a smartly outfitted woman who brushes by a group of homeless men without acknowledging them as they make way for her—based on an actual scene Garvey witnessed by a film shoot in Vancouver—perhaps he would feel differently and more threatened if he were in the woman’s shoes.  Despite this, the tune has a nice, blue-toned chromaticism, punctuated at beginning and end by backing vocalist Chilli Chilton’s cry, “Are you quake awake?”  It is a sad irony that a song treating one of the record’s most somber topics, the suicide of a man on the train tracks between Manchester and London, “The Delayed 3:15,” is, at least in compositional terms, its slightest, but in the larger scheme, this matters little.  Giants of All Sizes is a stellar achievement, whether taken sheerly on its own terms or as a lamentation for a once great nation that has lost its way.    A

Sample song  “Empires”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJa5FvCaBJc

FENNESZ, Agora (Touch Music)—Whereas Fennesz’s previous record, Bécs (see the 2014 music survey), was runner-up to my album of the year, Agora is too close to pure ambient music for my liking.  Consisting of just four compositions, each between ten and twelve and a half minutes long, the album is nearly all Christian Fennesz, as is the composer’s wont.  He does mix in wordless vocals from Katharina Caecilia Fennesz (his daughter) on “Rainfall” and from Mira Waldmann (his wife) on the title track (together with “field recordings” by Manfred Neuwirth, an Austrian director/cinematographer/sound installation artist), but they are so subtly introduced that, unless you looked at the back cover credits on the disc’s box, you probably would not even notice them.  The music seems particularly inert on the opening song, “In My Room,” all buzzy overtones, thrumming percussion underneath, and synth chords that resolve all too readily, the same way, time after time.   But “Agora” is also largely featureless and bereft of development, spectral phantoms half-emerging out of the gloaming, an eerie reverberance throughout.  “We Trigger the Sun,” the final number, begins promisingly, with humming reverb that evokes Stereolab’s great album Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993), yet an intro of that type kicked off a driving tune for the Anglo-French outfit, whereas Fennesz is content to lay back amid the pedals and amplifiers and foist the same repeating guitar chord pattern on us ad infinitum.  At least there is a guitar progression of sorts here, rudimentary as it might be, yielding toward the end to pure keyboards suffused with sunshiny bliss.  Easily the best composition is “Rainfall.”  Things actually happen in this piece, and at choice intervals, you can even hear Katharina’s singing!  About four minutes into the twelve-minute song, a genuine string theme coalesces, sketchy yet still poignant, as the listener’s ear and brain do the work of filling in the blanks.  Halfway through “Rainfall,” a bridge of sorts is created and then extended via agitated, chamfered guitar fretwork that once more repeats endlessly.  Ultimately, though, this is a bridge to nowhere, continuing on until it dies out quietly in the final twenty seconds.  Rather a shame that this more intricate and kinetic instrumental serves to point out just how hollow are the others on the disc.    B

Sample song  “Rainfall”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0IacFZCjmY

FKA TWIGS, Magdalene (Young Turks Recordings)—Imagine combining the theatricality and classically inspired explorations of a Kate Bush with the sophisticated, artsy rhythm and blues of an Alicia Keys and you have FKA Twigs’s second full-length album, Magdalene.  Comparisons with Tahliah Debrett Barnett’s first album as FKA Twigs, LP1 (see the 2014 music survey), are daunting simply because so much time has passed between them (in the interim, she did produce one EP that was made available only in electronic formats).  But I would venture to say that the new one is a little less experimental (which is not to deny its own experimentation), less indebted to trip-hop, and more emotive and direct.  As was the case on LP1, Twigs had plenty of help making this record, but the cast of supporting characters now is entirely different.  The fingerprints of the New York-based Chilean producer and recording artist Nicolas Jaar are all over this disc; additionally, she draws from the young London musician Ethan P. Flynn, the Welsh electronic musician/producer Lewis Roberts (a.k.a. Koreless), the Norwegian DJ/producer Magnus Høiberg (a.k.a. Cashmere Cat), the American songwriter/musician/producer Benny Blanco, the London artist/producer CY AN, the Los Angeles record producers Michael Uzowuru and Jeff Kleinman, Skrillex (Sonny John Moore), and Daniel Lopatin (see the 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2018 music surveys under “Oneohtrix Point Never”), among others.  With all these hands in the mix, it is important to note that Twigs has co-writing credit on all nine tracks.  The opening piece sets the tone.  The repetitive lyric of “Thousand Eyes” is like a mantra, expressing pain and vulnerability, at the cusp of a fracturing relationship, that is only highlighted by the noh drama spareness of the accompaniment, just bits of percussion, like a gong, and keyboard.  Twigs, as she did on her previous album, affectingly multitracks her elegant and pliant soprano to form a chorus.  The first reference to Mary Magdalene comes in song two, “Home with You.”  As a non-Christian, I find it hard to grasp the resonance between the iconic figure of the Gospels and the more mundane female characters given voice in this song, or in “Mary Magdalene” or any of the others on the album; she is a consort, a witness, a helpmate, perhaps a repentant sinner.  Are these protagonists any or all of those?  The lyric of “Home with You” actually appears to size up a reversal of the traditional male/female roles, with the singer contemplating the costs of fame and success, yet, she avers, she would put that all aside and rush home if she knew her partner were feeling lonely.  Musically, the song employs some of the breakbeat trappings of trip-hop (as does “Holy Terrain” later on), but it also pairs the vocals with piano and clarinet, an unusual instrument for a twenty-first-century pop song (the Ethan Flynn effect), as the domestic drama comes to a sweetly incandescent climax.  “Sad Day,” like “Home with You” released as a single, matches it for emotional intensity but is also wistful, swingy, tightly constructed—though I dislike the melodic extension that commences with the words “you’re running.”  On “Holy Terrain,” Twigs has a vocal counterpart, the American rapper Future (Nayvadius Wilburn); no shocker to reveal that I could happily live without his crude patter or his Auto-tuned pseudo-Jamaican toasting, yet even I have to admit that the harmonization he serves up is an effective contrast against Twigs’s melody.  “Fallen Alien” begins in Radiohead mode (lots of moody electric keyboards—their song was “Subterranean Homesick Alien” [1997], however), though it does not remain there beyond the intro.  This song is a heady brew of alienation, searching, tenderness, deceit, and vengeance, a mini melodrama heightened by the passion in Twigs’s voice, abetted by the Greek chorus that is both herself and her alter ego.  The Lopatin effect is not so visible on the song he co-wrote, “Daybed,” a subdued, breathy, warbly number with lots of synthesizer sustain; some of the verses are either head-scratching (“possessive is my daybed”) or eyebrow-raising (“faux my cunnilingus”).  The album ends with a song nearly as stark as the opener:  “Cellophane,” however, is quieter and, if pleading, at least somewhat less fraught.  It also showcases the range of the singer’s instrument, not just in terms of pitch but dynamics and expressiveness as well.  Incidentally, the video link for “Cellophane” below illustrates that if you are pole dancing, the fact that you are also wearing eight-inch Lucite heels becomes immaterial, or just about so.  Barnett rejects the R&B label, arguing, with some cause, that if she were white rather than of mixed race, no one would make that categorization.  Even so, when I listen to songs like “Sad Day” or “Mirrored Heart,” I cannot but think of The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003).  If LP1 was a promising start, Magdalene is the encore well worth waiting for.    A

Sample song  “Cellophane”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkLjqFpBh84

FLOATING POINTS, Crush (Ninja Tune)—My response to the debut album from Sam Shepherd, recording as Floating Points, Elaenia (see the 2015 music survey), lay somewhere between warm and lukewarm.  Crush is a little different and yet very much the same.  Shepherd is again working largely with vintage, analog synthesizers, usually multiple synths within a single track.  This time, though, there are no actual guitars or drums.  His own voice is slyly insinuated into three of the tracks, just one fairly inconspicuous component of his instrumental collage.  He uses a string quartet on several compositions, as he did on the debut, but their contributions, too, are so subtle as to be easily overlooked.  In fact, for “Anasickmodular,” which was partly recorded live at an Amsterdam festival called Dekmantel, it is hard to distinguish their presence at all.  The one exception is the opening track, “Falaise.”  Here, Shepherd has not just the strings but a chamber choir of winds as well—flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn.  Although the Buchla and other synthesizers are hardly muted (they are, however, noise gated), this changes the balance of the composition, tilting it toward modern classical and setting it apart from anything that follows.  “Falaise” is freighted with angst, starting serenely and then building to an almost unbearable intensity full of trills and tremolo before being abruptly cut off.  The contrast with the song that succeeds it, “Last Bloom”—well conceived and snappy in its pacing yet coldly robotic—could not be greater.  “Requiem for CS70 and Strings” is appropriately austere and somber, even if its pathos falls well short of Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” which might well have been one of its inspirations.  Its nearest spiritual companion on the disc is “Bias,” a stolid number built on a descending triad in one synth while another improvises freely above and a MAM ADX1 drum synthesizer provides the percussion line.  The starkly isolated tones, beats, zaps, and squiggles of “Karakul” serve as lead-in to the pièce de résistance, at least among the post-“Falaise” offerings, “LesAlpx.”  This galloping quasi-instrumental (voice once again barely registering), with its thrumming bass chords, churning ostinato, and dire overtones, has a sense of action and propulsion found nowhere else on the record.  The most charmingly tuneful composition, “Sea-Watch,” is a tranquil and pellucid dialogue between Wurlitzer electric keyboard and the Yamaha CS70, with a Binson Echorec for echo chamber effects and, ultimately, string embellishment.  The final two selections are called “Apoptose,” which is a biological term for what happens when certain cells in the body are signaled that it is time for them to die.  Part I is a clarion, simple, somewhat mournful tune played primarily on the Rhodes Chroma, with underlying “percussion” from the MAM ADX1, whereas Part II is merely an elaboration on the skeletal percussive underpinning, with the Buchla synthesizer reduced to zippy and glitchy effects.  It is a strange way to end an album, and perhaps it might have been more effective had Part II come first.  Overall, there is more to like on Crush than on Elaenia, and yet, nothing on the current album is as compelling as “Peroration Six” from the first one; thus, let us call it a wash, and the grade remains the same.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Last Bloom”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x0t1l7QeeY

FLYING LOTUS, Flamagra (Warp Records)—Steven Ellison’s first studio record as Flying Lotus in five years, Flamagra sadly flames out without providing much heat or illumination.  Sure, there are still some intriguing concepts and arrangements—after all, this is a guy who has done genius-level work in the past (see the 2010 music survey for Cosmogramma)—but not nearly enough to satisfy.  The new release has the fingerprints of Ellison’s close associate Thundercat (Stephen Bruner) all over it; indeed, it is in some respects more like Thundercat’s most recent record, Drunk (see the 2017 music survey), than what we have come to expect from Flying Lotus.  (Note:  Drunk was a better record.)  There are many tracks, most of them quite short, and no small quantity of guest artists, including Thundercat himself, in relaxation mode and falsetto register, on “The Climb,” which, like much of the record, is innocuous, substituting pure groove for anything revelatory.  The guests range from somewhat familiar to very well known, and a number of them are based in Southern California, like Ellison himself.  Few are putting their A-game on display.  I would make an exception for Denzel Curry, on “Black Balloons Reprise.”  The “reprise” part puzzled me until I discovered the original “Black Balloons,” which is far more chill, on Curry’s 2018 album Ta13oo.  Despite my general disdain for hip-hop, on the “reprise,” Curry really sticks the landing with the punchy syncopations of his apocalyptic rap—the song goes from chill to chilling as soon as he enters the picture (about thirty seconds in), ending with a dire chorus.  The presence of George Clinton, a funk legend, is squandered on “Burning Down the House,” different from and far inferior to the Talking Heads song of the same name from 1983.  The gurgling, nail-chewingly fretful vocal is strange, and the whole thing comes across like an outtake from Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982) that would have been better left on the cutting-room floor.  Even weirder is “Yellow Belly,” featuring the Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack (her real name!).  The song is “dope” in the sense that the production gives it a funhouse mirror aspect, with eccentric chords, inconstant beats, sluggish pacing, and druggily drowsy vocals.  If the words were not so stupid (“we’ve got a problem/where are all the condoms?”; “he’s got titties in his face!”), perhaps this might be a minor masterpiece of outré hip-hop.  David Lynch’s star turn on “Fire Is Coming” recalls Dennis Hopper’s reading of a tale on Gorillaz’s “Fire Coming out of the Monkey’s Head” from Demon Days (2005).  But the Hopper story was a parable, if a simplistic one, about greed, exploitation of the goodwill of innocents, and environmental degradation, whereas Lynch’s recitation is a fairly pointless story, full of extraneous details, about a massive conflagration heading toward a residential neighborhood.  Aside from this and the Clinton collaboration, there is one more offering that relates to the title of the album, birthed in a year when California wildfires were about as bad as they had ever been, “Hot Oct.,” the last track.  There is about a minute of Ellison’s own heavily denatured vocals, resigned to the destruction that autumn fires cause, followed by crackling sounds and a mystical “the dreams will carry you beyond the flame/We embrace the beauty of the infinite” before it all dies out quietly.  The instrumental or quasi-instrumental selections are for the most part mere vignettes or interludes.  Flying Lotus reaches for more on the opening tune, “Heroes,” another reprise of sorts from elsewhere in his discography, which recaptures some of the dreamy magic of his earlier recordings, with vertiginous chord progressions and lots of bravura production touches, interspersing barely intelligible dialogue and sound effects from the Dragonball anime series.  The beat behind this song is extracted and reprocessed, with little else around it, for “Heroes in the Half Shell.”  Sandwiched between the two is “Post Requisite,” as cool and jiggly as a jello mold, even though it never ventures beyond the vibe it initially sets up.  These first three tracks are thus a pleasant opening, rudely interrupted by Anderson .Paak’s mewling rap on “More.”  (In fairness, he spends more time singing than rapping, and that is more tolerable.)  Other performers invited to participate on this disc are Little Dragon (see the 2011 music survey), Shabazz Palaces (their second guest appearance in this survey; see the Battles review above), Toro y Moi, and Solange (Knowles), Beyoncé’s younger and perhaps less talented (but more pugilistic) sister.  Solange’s song, “Land of Honey,” meant to be languorous, simply washes out.  Among the longer instrumental tracks, “Takashi” is too breezy and busy to be penetrating or soulful.  The squelchy “Pilgrim Side Eye” aspires to the cleverness of “Putty Boy Strut” from Flying Lotus’s Until the Quiet Comes (see the 2012 music survey) but comes up well short.  The forgettably titled “Say Something” is interesting because it sounds like nothing else on the record; a waltz for piano and strings, it could have served as the score to a (brief) scene in a black-and-white movie from Central Europe or Argentina.  “Pygmy,” about as short as its name suggests, is also set apart from anything else on the record because of its cumbia beat and jungly sound effects.  Vintage keyboards such as the Wurlitzer and Fender Rhodes electric pianos and the Moog synthesizer from Brandon Coleman, who shares composing credit on a number of tunes, contribute greatly to a general atmosphere of intergalactic funk, as does the cover/jacket art depicting various nebulas as well as fantastical scenes.  On more than one track, the keyboard part seems in perpetual danger of slipping behind the drumbeat, yet they never truly go out of sync.  Flying Lotus envisioned an eternal flame blazing for Flamagra; instead, we get sixty-seven minutes of brilliant sparks emanating from a cloud of gas and ash.    B+/B

Sample song  “Black Balloons Reprise” (featuring Denzel Curry):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isn8Qp-H0N4

GALACTIC, Already Ready Already (Tchoup-Zilla Records)—After several years of waiting, I was ready for much more than Already Ready Already delivers.  It is a slight effort by any measure, not least of which is overall length.  Coming in at less than twenty-five minutes for the eight tracks, it is barely more than E.P. duration.  Galactic, for some time now a five-man outfit, is at its best when jamming on its own.  Its signature mélange of funk, acid, and Dixieland jazz can be mighty tasty.  However, in recent years, the band has turned toward showcasing local New Orleans talent, receding into the role of a backing ensemble.  Whereas on prior records such as Ya-Ka-May (see the 2010 music survey) and Carnivale Electricos (see the 2012 music survey), some of the guest performers had recognition beyond the narrow confines of the Crescent City, Already Ready Already presents decidedly lesser lights, with the possible exception of David Shaw of the Revivalists and Nahko (a.k.a. “Nahko Bear,” born David Joel Bell) of Nahko and Medicine for the People—the latter being the only outsider (from the West Coast) contributing.  They are both featured on “Everlasting Light,” a low-key, dusky yet aspirational number with a bitchin’ bari sax intro from Ben Ellman, moody guitar accompaniment evocative of the Eagles’ “One of These Nights” (1975), and noir touches:  muted trumpet from Shamarr Allen and whistling, toward the end.  The other four songs with lyrics hand the microphone to female vocalists.  None of these are wonderful, though “Clap Your Hands” has a rousing refrain and terrific horn charts from the band’s supplemental corps, Allen on trumpet and Corey Henry, a frequent collaborator, on trombone, together with Ellman’s harmonica, supporting the singing of “Miss Charm Taylor” (Charmisha Renee Baker).  “Touch Get Cut” is a swingy blues number, taking a tough-girl, back-off-mister approach via the husky voice of Erica Falls.  “Going Straight Crazy” with Princess Shaw (Samantha Montgomery) is an unremarkable, by-the-numbers, leisurely rhythm and blues, while “Dance at My Funeral” is essentially a single bass groove, on top of which Boyfriend (Suzannah Powell), a white rapper/performance artist originally from Tennessee, chatters endlessly and irritatingly; the song’s one saving grace is the brief sax solo flourish from Ellman.  One of the three instrumentals, “Goose Grease” is an acidic slow jam, in which the saxophone lays out the single theme, which is picked up, teased, and reinterpreted by guitars and then by some space-age flights of fancy on the organ from Rich Vogel.  The other band-only tunes bookend the tracklist and give the album its seemingly redundant title.  “Already” mines many of the same raw materials as “Goose Grease” but fabricates a louder, more intense sound, full of psychedelic fuzz and yowling guitars, for the less than two minutes it spins.  Galactic saved the best for last with “Ready Already,” a rich little gumbo of burbling wah-wah pedals, shimmering and gleaming electric keyboard tones, vigorous percussion attacks, and Ellman’s sax letting loose.  This is a mere morsel, though, leaving one’s appetite whetted with no hope of being sated—at least until Galactic retires the cabaret lounge act and returns to doing what nature intended it to—grooving, New Orleans–style.    B

Sample song  “Ready Already”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szl-Ce3U7Ns

MATMOS, Plastic Anniversary (Thrill Jockey Records)—I practically guffawed (emotional expressiveness is not my strong suit) when I opened the liner notes to this disc and read about the first track:  “1. Breaking Bread—All sounds generated by breaking LPs and 7” singles by the soft rock group Bread and amplifying shards of vinyl.  No sampling of Bread’s music took place.”  Thus we are off on another drolly intriguing Matmos adventure.  Plastic Anniversary is much less minimalist than the most recent release by the duo of M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel prior to this, Ultimate Care II (see the 2016 music survey), which derived all its sounds from the laundry machine in the couple’s basement in Baltimore.  There is a lot more that can be done in the expansive realm of plastics, though it almost seems like a cheat to include actual instruments that happen to be made of plastic, as Matmos does in a number of songs.  I am at a loss to divine how certain sounds were generated, based on the liner notes’ information.  For example, “Interior with Billiard Balls & Synthetic Fat” uses just the two titular subjects, plus Bakelite dominos and “sampling.”  The first minute of the piece is purely percussive and easy to interpret.  But where do the synthesizer-like chordal and chiming sounds that follow come from?  Just what is being sampled?  It is conceivable that somehow rubbing and amplifying the synthetic tissue yielded them (hard to imagine them coming from pool balls or dominos), but no interview with the artists I looked at explained this.  In any case, these tones lend an eerie resonance, as though the listener were gliding through an empty wax museum.  Artificial tissue comes to the fore again in “Silicone Gel Implant,” perhaps the first piece of music ever composed using a breast implant as an instrument, along with plastic flute and pan flute.  Greg Saunier, Deerhoof’s drummer, rocks the plastic percussion on this bouncy, glitchy tune, which shuffles along to a quasi–bossa nova rhythm, replete with beeping and mewling sounds.  The aforementioned “Breaking Bread” is much funkier than anything David Gates and Bread might have come up with, though the comparison is admittedly unfair.  “The Crying Pill” is, naturally, lachrymose, if in a squeaky, Harpo Marx sort of way—far too kinetic and spirited for the weepiness of the theme to be taken seriously.  It processes sound through a vintage audio effects unit called the Roland RE-201, or Space Echo, which I fear might actually have metal knobs and wiring (perish the thought!).  The title track is appropriately ceremonial, slightly solemn in its disposition, making use of an entire choir of plastic “brass” instruments, plus poker chips, an exercise ball, a jockstrap, and a bodhrán for percussion, as well as more pan flute and an ocarina.  It is actually more a fanfare than is “Fanfare for Polyethylene Waste Containers, which is heavily percussive and has a futuristic vibe smacking of Startled Insects from the Curse of the Pheromones (1987) era.  The latter composition also sought out the assistance of the Whitefish High School Drumline (the album was recorded in Whitefish, Montana), one of whose members actually appears to be named Dakota Johnson, for the plastic percussion that accompanies the plastic brass section.  Things take a more sinister turn on “Thermoplastic Riot Shield,” whose varied sounds—whooshing, squeaks, pounding, something resembling a tripped security alarm—remarkably all came from the titular device, formerly in service with the Albuquerque Police Department.  With its whistles and exuberant drumbeats (again the Whitefish High drummers, along with Saunier), “Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom” at times masquerades as a samba street procession, albeit one from Jorge Ben’s or Tom Zé’s most lurid nightmares, ending in a cinematic suspense sequence of blaring tones that decay into rumbling and the sound of Lego bricks being shuffled.  This carries over directly into the final piece, “Plastisphere,” which recalls nothing if not a crackling forest fire (bubble wrap), complete with the high-pitched whines that sometimes emanate from air escaping wood being consumed.  Other devices utilized for various songs included packing tape, toilet brushes, an ATM card, a DNA kit, PVC pipe, and duck calls.  Not only is Plastic Anniversary amusing, not only well conceived and skillfully composed; it is educational as well.  I had no idea what a Pelican case (a brand name) was and had certainly never heard of SynDaver Labs (the creator of the synthetic fat tissue), a Tampa company specializing in reproducing human body parts (“synthetic cadaver”) in plastic, nor had I ever contemplated the existence of exoplanet G237b, toward which the ten-second song fragment “Extending the Plastisphere to G237b” (answering the Zen koan “What is the sound of one salad bowl singing?”) has been beamed, thanks to some particularly hip scientists from the Catalonia Institute of Space Studies.  There is a serious side to all this—without being didactic in the slightest, Schmidt and Daniel take stock of the vast range of plastics in our industrial/leisure society and what they are doing to ecosystems across the globe:  “nurdles,” preproduction plastic pellets, pollute waterways, and yet, manmade polymers in the ocean also provide a surface (the “plastisphere”) on which microorganisms can grow and inverterbrates can feed or attach.  Above all, the record is a tribute to the two men’s relationship with each other, beginning in San Francisco twenty-five years ago.    A

Sample song  “The Crying Pill”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltNwzJSsSPo

OPETH, In Cauda Venenum (Moderbolaget/ Nuclear Blast Records)—There is some terrific music on In Cauda Venenum (which translates as “the poison is in the tail,” as with a scorpion); I only wish it held together better.  The band Opeth, which intriguingly has evolved over its long career (this is its thirteenth L.P.) from death metal to progressive metal and even progressive rock, characterized the album on its credits page of the CD jacket as “an observation,” consciously or not echoing the debut of King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, from exactly half a century earlier.  As observations go, though, the King Crimson record was, in its own, obliquely hippie-ish/progressive way, far more pointed and comprehensible.  This is not a matter of a Swedish band attempting to write English-language lyrics off the top:  In Cauda Venenum was issued as a double-record set, with the same music on each disc, the first sung by Mikael Åkerfeldt in the band’s native Swedish, the second in English translation.  Lyrics are clunky and pretentious, just bad poetics in general, when one would wish for more cogency to go along with the powerful musical themes on display.  Occasionally, Åkerfeldt, who wrote all the lyrics as well as the all the notes, hits the mark, as toward the end of “The Garroter,” with the couplet, “The beautiful people look down from ruby vantage points/While in the gutter starvation invites us to join.”  The imagery is for the most part typical Goth fantasy-genre issue, as is common for progressive and metal bands, but with some twenty-first-century schizoid intrusions (“dopamine,” “online,” “algorithms”).  The album incorporates a few spoken-word bits, including some dialogue from band members’ families (a child’s musings on the nature and existence of God, a mother’s response) as well as an excerpt from a poem, “Inget särskilt har hänt” (Nothing special has happened) by Bruno K. Öijer, and another from the late prime minister Olof Palme’s speech to the Swedish nation at the outset of his first term in power in 1969, which precedes the song “Dignity”; these remain in Swedish on the English-language version.  Even the music, for all the glints of compositional genius within its strata, is sprawling and unfocused.  Save for the opener, “Garden of Earthly Delights,” with its ponderous heavenly choir mixed with Giorgio Moroder–style electronic keyboard figurations, the songs are long, ranging from five to nine or so minutes (the album in total is nearly sixty-eight minutes), and complex, often moving on from one theme to the next.  This is typical of progressive rock, but it has been executed more deftly by the original English masters of the genre (like King Crimson).  Åkerfeldt has certain favored devices, such as transitions, sometimes abrupt, between the full band rocking at top volume and quiet, lyrical passages featuring just acoustic guitar or piano and voice, or choral samplings.  There are also sudden minor-to-major shifts, most notably in the opening theme of “Universal Truth,” whose chameleon chromaticism is clearly the album’s apex, and even touches of Middle Eastern exoticism, à la Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” (1975), within the same song.  Elsewhere, there are elements that recall the Dutch group Focus (the roaring chorus at the outset of “Dignity”), Heart (the “Barracuda”-like crunching bass that underlies “Heart in Hand,” before it mellows out), or the Edgar Winter Band (the wah-wah guitar screeches of the middle instrumental section of “Continuum,” following incongruously from a quiet, synthesized woodwind chorale).  After a Spanish guitar intro and some moody piano chords, “The Garroter” opens up with a slinky, syncopated theme better suited to a 1960s crime caper than to this bloody domestic drama, later confusingly transposed to a larger allegory about the lust for power and control, as if Macbeth had started out by murdering his own family.  “Lovelorn Crime” is exceptional in that it is in ballad mode throughout (the plaintive, George Harrison-ish–titled “All Things Will Pass” at the end of the tracklist has the second-highest ballad-to-blazing proportion, ending on a vehement yet affirmative tone), and although the guitars wail at peak moments, there are no high-intensity ensemble attacks.  The song that follows it, “Charlatan,” is fast, pounding, and heavily accented, in the style of the Mars Volta (see the 2012 music survey).  Now that that group has disbanded, Opeth appears to have picked up the banner for metal-edged, highly agitated, and overwrought prog rock, as I alluded to in the 2016 music survey review of Opeth’s previous release, Sorceress.  And yet, the Mars Volta’s Noctourniquet was album of the year, showing just how favorably I am disposed to this kind of music.  Even when done imperfectly.  So much on In Cauda Venenum tantalizes; it just needed a musical editor to tighten its structures, as well as a total verse overhaul.     Too much to ask?    A-/B+

Sample song  “Universal Truth”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypdlAMXIvCM

POND, Tasmania (Spinning Top Records/Caroline Australia)—As it happens, I was reviewing this record during the 2020 Australian Open, a tournament whose very existence seemed threatened in the lead-up because of widespread wildfires in New South Wales and Victoria states, sending choking smoke toward Melbourne.  Pond recorded Tasmania before the worst Australian summer fire season in living memory, yet the signs were already there, making this the most environmentally conscious album the Aussie fivesome has yet produced (and they had one called The Weather a couple of years back; see the 2017 music survey).  Lead singer Nick Allbrook muses in the title track, “I might go and shack up in Tasmania/before the ozone goes and paradise burns in Australia/Who knows?” a stanza that is repeated in “Burnt Out Star.”  Despite the seriousness of Tasmania’s primary concern, much of the first half of the record has an easy-stepping, white-boy funkiness comparable to, of all bands, Hot Chip’s (see the 2008, 2010, and 2012 music surveys) made-for-the-dancefloor sparklers.  Still, the opening song, “Daisy,” is plenty earnest, in a midcareer Arcade Fire (see the 2007 and 2010 music surveys) kind of way.  I am also reminded of The War on Drugs (see the 2014 and 2017 music surveys), if that band were not as laid back as it is.  The faux innocence of the opening verse slides away on a matrix of synth tones that undergo an ominous development in their harmonics followed by a glissando that is a quieter echo of the famous one from the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (1967) before launching into the snappy main theme, with Allbrook settling into the Win Butler (of Arcade Fire) role.  The same harmonic shift and glissando recur at the end.  “Sixteen Days,” which succeeds “Daisy,” is the band in full Hot Chip mode, and the boys pull it off nicely.  Apart from the chorus of “Tasmania” quoted above, that song’s lyrics are scattershot, mixing global crises with wanderlust and concerns of a more personal nature, but the music’s gentle funk has a winningly warm and bubbly appeal.  Following that, the album takes a slight dip in quality, if not in energy—the gloppy “Hand Mouth Dancer” is, as the title suggests, the most electronic dance music–oriented tune.  It is sandwiched by two more contemplative songs, “The Boys Are Killing Me,” which has some touching reminiscences, and the more cosmic “Goodnight, P.C.C.”  “Burnt Out Star” is unusual in that its five-minute coda is considerably longer than the main body of the song.  I do not understand the repeated references to 1917 in the coda (the other words are tough to pick up, with repeated mentions of “Jakarta streets,” though the lyrics website Genius.com has captured them, or at least an approximation), but its swinging groove far outdoes the song itself, which, aside from a gleaming chorus and some further intriguing snippets of reminiscing, sounds overwrought.  More overwrought still (and even spacier in its electronic whoops than “Goodnight, P.C.C.”), with Allbrook in falsetto register throughout, piling one self-pitying or self-aggrandizing European trip recollection atop another, “Shame” is the record’s least coherent track.  Both the emotional temperature and the falsetto range are lowered for the finale, “Doctor’s In,” which is meant to soar but never gains much altitude.  Its verse makes a stab at the heroic, and the treble orchestration is on a grand scale, yet its ambitions are limited enough that it comes off as merely complaisant.  Tasmania was meant as a companion album to The Weather, but, unburdened by that record’s concept scheme, it is freer, under the production guidance of Kevin Parker (Tame Impala), to do what Pond does best, serving up questing, entertaining psychedelic pop.    A-

Sample song  “Daisy”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap2gStsDZZo

WEVAL, The Weight (Kompakt)—A certain chameleon quality appertains to the music of Amsterdam-based Weval, whose name is shortened from the Dutch word for waterfall, waterval.  The Weight is moody throughout, though its creators, Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers, in a recent interview that appeared on the XLR8R website, aver that it is brighter and more colorful than its predecessor, the self-titled debut LP (there have also been EPs) from 2016, which I have never heard.  Still, there are times when a song would feel right at home among the work of Thom Yorke (see below) and Radiohead, as with the furtive, downcast “Someday”—most of the time, though, that is hardly the case.  Other times, it more closely approaches the sound of Burial (William Bevan), or even of Olive (viz. the languid, woozily melodic final track, “Who’s Running Who”).  Even with “Someday,” the breakbeat sampling that forms its percussion track is not something you would likely find on a Radiohead disc.  Looking at the video for “Someday” (see the link below), one might readily guess that these two guys had their origins in filmmaking rather than music.  Albers was deeply influenced by trip-hop, which readily explains the breakbeats, while Coolen’s interests ran to house music and jazz.  There are guitars on the record, notably on “The Weight,” “False State of Mind,” and “Look Around,” but it is synthesizer heavy; in fact, a good half-dozen keyboards or more were used.  The bandmates generally splice in their own vocals, but for “Are You Even Real,” they summoned a close collaborator, KW (Koen-Willem) Toering, to sing, and on “Silence on the Wall,” they reached out to the Dutch songstress Romy Dya (formerly known as Jalise Romy; mislabeled in the liner notes as “Romy Day”).  (“Roll Together” samples an uncredited female vocalist.)  “Are You Even Real” is if anything even more Radiohead-ish than “Someday,” yet, notwithstanding the skeptical pose of its lyric and its fascinatingly muddy tonal palette, it is somehow the sunniest tune on the disc.  “Silence on the Wall,” with Dya in decidedly more subdued mode than one can hear on her other recordings, is austere, liquid in tone and flow, yet brittle as an icicle; it segues into “Look Around,” which retains the drumbeat, though both that and its wan vocal are ultimately overwhelmed by swirling, pulsating keyboard arpeggiations that reach back to Giorgio Moroder for inspiration.  “Heartbreak Television” is one of the Burial-friendly tracks:  highly distorted vocals, drowsy pacing, interesting percussive effects, all in the service of a full-bodied lament that stands out from an album many of whose songs might strike a critical listener as bloodless.  The plaintive title track, which opens the record, also features heavily processed vocals, amid an insistent drumbeat, tinny piano, and yowling synths.  The keyboards in “Roll Together” perform a lot of doorbell-type chiming but do so at times with a timbre that approximates steel pans; part way through the tune, the tempo briefly slows and becomes stretchy.  No one would mistake the morose, deceptively laconic (until klaxon sounds build in via the synths and then it churns) “Doesn’t Do Anything” for a Latin number, yet is introduced with a clave rhythm.  “Heaven, Listen” is one of the shortest of the thirteen compositions, but it packs a remarkable rhythmic variety and complexity into its three minutes, while “Same Little Thing” contains the album’s funkiest rhythm track.  The Weight, like many records grounded in house and other forms of electronic dance music, can fixate on a particular groove or motif, digging in stubbornly in lieu of further development.  That has the effect of making an album that clocks in at nearly one hour seem longer still.  Nonetheless, these gentlemen have been perfecting their craft for nearly a decade, and, aside from being expert electronic sound collagists, they display a wealth of compositional ingenuity as well.        A/A-

Sample song  “Someday”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wEvzqdDZg

A WINGED VICTORY FOR THE SULLEN, The Undivided Five (Ninja Tune)—Serene, atmospheric, brooding, A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s third studio album is a score crying out for some art-house movie director to adopt it.  It is no surprise that the Brussels- and Berlin-based American duo behind this act’s peculiar appellation, Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, have already composed two actual soundtracks.  Ambient music comes in various stripes; A Winged Victory’s tilts in the direction of classical music.  The album was recorded at eight different studios across Europe, from Hungary to Iceland, and the orchestral recording/tracking was done at a studio at Hungary’s official Magyar Rádió in Budapest.  The Undivided Five, named for the interval known as the “perfect fifth” in music theory (it is also their fifth recording, counting the soundtracks), is said by the label’s press release to have been inspired by Claude Debussy, as well as the recently deceased Icelandic composer Jóhan Jóhansson, with whom the pair had worked closely.  Wisely, O’Halloran and Wiltzie are not so crass as to try and create ersatz French impressionism, even in the opening composition, titled with grandiose reverence “Our Lord Debussy.”  The whimsical nature of the song titles is an odd fit with A Winged Victory’s seriousness of purpose.  “Adios, Florida” and “Keep It Dark, Deutschland” are eyebrow raising in themselves, but then there is “Aqualung, Motherf***er.”  Do not expect anything even remotely approaching Jethro Tull here; the song (wordless/voiceless, as are all the compositions) is of a piece with the others on the disc, a mix of piano figurations that are little more than ground bass and ominous synthesizer drone, with hornlike overtones attaining prominence as the piece progresses.  (Of course, an aqualung is an actual thing, not just an album by a seventies prog-rock band.)  The first time I listened to this record, with its Sigur Rós–like glacial pacing, I thought, “Pretty pianism, not a lot going on; a bit boring.”  I subsequently revised my opinion.  The most majestic—and longest—offering is the open tribute to Debussy that kicks things off.  Nearly ten minutes in length, it is structured very simply:  an almost unvarying pattern of piano chords, resolving tonally again and again, but set against a background of sustained synthesizer notes that change in pitch, frequency, texture, volume, and reverberation.  The keyboard chord progressions on their own are modestly touching, but it is the contrast with the background sheen that lifts this piece out of the ordinary.  When the string instruments make their appearance toward the end, it is ineffably sad.  The follow-up, “Sullen Symphony,” maintains the somber tone (adding some wind-tunnel effects) but is less affecting.  No pseudo-Debussy on the disc, yet the opening of the very brief “The Haunted Victorian Pencil” is self-consciously modeled on one of Debussy’s contemporaries and rivals, Erik Satie.  Had the duo stuck with Satie’s characteristic minimalism, this bagatelle would have been effective enough as a “nouvelle Gymnopédie” or “Gnossienne.”  Instead, in trying to flesh out the short theme, they cheapen it somewhat.  “The Slow Descent Has Begun” puts the string section up front, allowing it to emerge from the background mists hauntingly and heart-rendingly.  “The Rhythm of a Dividing Pair” is as rhythmless as any other selection on the album, even if it starts out with more chiming in the synths.  Perhaps appropriately, “Adios, Florida” is the only track to acquire at least a mild sense of motion, as if something of consequence were going on, and even here, it takes nearly half the song before any of that occurs.  Still, the long-tone chromaticism and the agitated, attenuated violin passage are penetrating, until the music falls off in a sudden swoon at the close.  The Undivided Fifth might have benefited from greater contrasts in pacing or kinetic activity; then again, that might have risked disrupting the album’s unity of form and mood.    A

Sample song  “Aqualung, Motherf***er”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy3KCcK5qQA

NILÜFER YANYA, Miss Universe (ATO Records)—Having already put out several EPs since 2016, Nilüfer Yanya was more than ready when the time came for her debut LP, Miss Universe.  It exploded onto the scene with the force of megatons and rightly earned her heaps of critical praise.  Though the songs vary considerably stylistically and range comparably in their preoccupations, if there is an overriding thematic scheme to the record, it is imposed by means of communications at intervals from a made-up concern called WWAY Health (“we worry about your health”).  These occupy the shortest five of the album’s seventeen tracks, and although the voice messages are customer service–polite and solicitous, they come to reflect the frustration, the despair, and ultimately the futility of dealing with corporate bureaucracy, particularly where health care is concerned.  This superstructure invites the listener to view the rest of Miss Universe through the prism of angst, the pitfalls and complexities of human relationships, the tribulations of day-to-day living, and the way these sidetrack us from our aspirations.  Perhaps this is over-freighting with significance what is in the end a pop record with lyrics that are serviceable yet hardly Miltonesque.  But Yanya is well placed to give voice to this urban edginess.  Her vocal instrument is supple if not conventionally pretty, with a texture like thickening maple syrup and a tendency to use voice cracking as a technique, similar to her U.K. compatriot Adele.  A Londoner, Yanya absorbed the influences of Turkish traditional music from her (Turkish) father and classical music from her (Irish and Barbadian) mother, but you will not hear any of that on the record.  Instead, she gravitated toward rock and learned guitar and keyboards.  She plays guitar herself on most tracks but keys on only a few, largely relying on studio professionals to tickle the ivories.  The first real song on the album is also its most powerful statement, “In Your Head.”  Co-written with the American producer John Congleton, who has worked with a vast roster of artists (a number of whom have appeared in this survey over the years), it is surely one of the songs of the year, a straight-ahead rocker that sets the tone with its fingernail-chewing anxieties about love and acceptance, ultimately questioning one’s own sanity.  Nothing else on the disc quite measures up, but that is okay because the follow-up tune, “Paralysed,” has its own strengths.  A midtempo number co-written with Wilma Archer (which is actually a stage name for Will Archer, a producer from Newcastle), it sets up a nice contrast between the delicate picking of Mediterranean-style guitar figurations for the verse and the room-shaking reverb of the chorus’s guitar and bass attacks as Yanya ponders a fresh set of inner torments.  The singer chose well amid a potential constellation of London-based producers/musical collaborators from across Europe, such as Oli Barton-Wood, Dave Okumu, Bastian Laengbaek, and Lucy Lu (what is it with these Brit males adopting female aliases?), not to mention “Jazzi Bobbi” (this one actually IS female!), whose friendship with Yanya goes back to childhood, and Congleton and Archer.  Their taste for sophisticated, modern rhythm and blues shines through in tracks such as “Paradise” (co-written with Joseph Dworniak), which deftly marries breezy and reflective verse and harmonics to a power chorus, and the relaxed yet snippy “Melt” (Barton-Wood for both), on each of which Jazzi Bobbi adds her smooth saxophone filigree, as well as “Baby Blu” (Laengbaek), which is chromatically like a setting sun filtered through haze.  Lest you wonder whether Yanya can write any of her own music solo, “Monsters under the Bed” is entirely hers (Congleton on the production end) and is one of the album’s most soulful and moving tunes, with such spare arrangements as to give the illusion that it is just “a girl and her guitar.”  Even the weaker songs (“Safety Net” is the least distinguished of the bunch) are generally not at all bad.  The final track, “Heavyweight Champion of the Year,” is not a reprise of “The Unordained” (the two sit sandwiched around the final voice message) but acts as a pendant of sorts:  both were written by Yanya alone and feature heavily percussive guitar accents.  The insistent quality of “The Unordained” toward some kind of reckoning melts into an ambivalent resignation in “Heavyweight Champion.”  The Archer-produced voice messages serve as palate cleansers and preludes to the succeeding song and, as such, are unobtrusive, with one exception:  “Experience?” with its angel chorus intoning “paradise!” (also the name of the following song) and its shrill, treacly electric string accompaniment, is meant to be parodic but stands in jarring contrast to the material that surrounds it.  Hardly counts as a blemish on an album this good.        A/A-

Sample song  “In Your Head”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsxf541UI-8

THOM YORKE, Anima (XL Recordings)—I doubt that I am alone, though perhaps in a minority, in considering Anima a letdown.  The Radiohead frontman’s third solo album (not counting soundtracks like Suspiria—see the 2018 music survey), engineered and edited by Radiohead’s producer of choice, Nigel Godrich, trucks with anxieties, disturbing dreams, dystopian fantasies—but what Thom Yorke venture ever has not done so?  Having had Flying Lotus tour with his band, Yorke became interested in experimenting with sampling and sound loops and mastering the equipment used by electronica artists like Flying Lotus or Floating Points (see above for both) or Aphex Twin for live performances.  The record also manages to incorporate the London Contemporary Orchestra and Choir to add a Beatlesque, “Day in the Life” (1967) touch to segments of “Not the News” and the chorus element to “Dawn Chorus” and “I Am a Very Rude Person.”  Annoyingly, the LP version, which I do not have, contains a bonus track not on the CD, “(Ladies and Gentlemen, Thank You for Coming).”  Even compared to Radiohead’s most navel-gazing, sonically cramped output (Kid A [2000], Amnesiac [2001], In Rainbows [2007]) or Yorke’s own previous solo work, this is a remarkably amelodic album.  There is interesting music going on, but it is happening in the arrangements, not in the wan, skeletal themes.  It might be uncharitable to declare—and I say this having had the deepest admiration for Yorke and Radiohead for more than two decades—but the artist’s hallucinatory visions here can be classified as either bouncy (b) or quavery (q).  The bouncies are a little more satisfying on the whole—at least they have appealing beats, and perhaps the singer is taking himself a little less seriously.  The album opens with “Traffic” (b), which throbs and floats on layers of programmed drums, handclaps, shimmery synth tones, and a two-measure, six-note keyboard ostinato pattern that is improvised upon toward the end.  Its sung verse is more like an idea jotted down in an artist’s sketchbook than something fully fleshed out, however.  If this were the sort of minimalism that invites the mind to fill in the gaps, that might be ingenious, but there is too much else going on here.  “Twist” (b), the longest track, has a dual identity:  the first half has a strobing beat and just enough falsetto phrasing from Yorke to suggest plaintiveness; the second, starting four minutes in, is like an entirely different song, and a deeper and more poignant one, as its pianistic undertones strengthen the emotional pull, more than compensating for the faint, impressionistic ruminations of the singer.  The drumming (speeded up) of Radiohead bandmate Phil Selway is heard on “Impossible Knots” (b), which gets its verve almost entirely from the snappy rhythm guitar figuration that is its ground bass, oddly paired with Yorke’s enervated falsetto, which ends phrases on an interrogative rise in lieu of a serviceable tune.  The pick of the quaveries is “Last I Heard (… He Was Circling the Drain),” a funereal, echoey wallow that again draws power from its exquisite, phantasmagoric orchestrations, which firmly support the droopy, fainting-couch vocal—less a song than an outburst of angst bolstered by spoken reminiscences.  Its spookiness is nearly matched by the airless, brooding “The Axe” (q), with its insistent plea, “I thought we had a deal.”  By contrast, the thrumming keyboards of “Dawn Chorus” (q) appear benign, a momentary relief from the anhedonia, until juxtaposed with Yorke’s glumly nostalgic, spoken-word stream of consciousness.  The song with the simplest arrangements also comes closest to a fully fledged tune:  “I Am a Very Rude Person” (q).  The final offering (on the CD version, that is), “Runwayaway” (b), is one of Yorke’s most irritating ever, a sort of trance-drone (the surprisingly sunny, bluesy guitar intro at least is nice) over which his helium-modified voice (plus chorus) intones, “That’s when you know who your real friends are.”  Because there is no context for this remark, it is without significance.  Disaffection and disquiet are Thom Yorke’s stock in trade, but he could have presented them in ways less alienating to his audience.    B+

Sample song  “Last I Heard (… He Was Circling the Drain)”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I03xFqbxUp8


JAZZ

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], New Improvised Music from Buenos Aires (ESP-Disk)—(Full disclosure:  My good friend Steve Holtje manages ESP-Disk, the label that published this volume.)  The avant-garde jazz community in Argentina’s capital would appear to be a small and tight-knit group, based on the article by Jason Weiss, originally appearing in The Wire, that forms this album’s liner notes.  These artists face incredible obstacles, from complete lack of state support in a perpetually struggling economy to denial of suitable performance spaces, meaning that many live events take place in people’s private apartments or in art galleries.  On the other hand, as Weiss observes, the sense of nothing to lose allows these practitioners to take plenty of risks.  There are certainly times on this volume when that risk taking goes well beyond what I find palatable.  Fans of ESP’s output are, I presume on the whole, more tolerant of extended intervals of breathy rumblings and strained groaning sounds from trumpet and saxophone than I am.  But there are moments of sublime beauty as well.  “New” from the album title is a relative term, as the recordings collected here go back as far as seven years, and not quite all the artists are Argentine:  Ramiro Molina, the electric guitarist in the duo Rulemares, is Chilean, and the pianist Agustí Fernández is from Spain.  Some of the more austere selections, such as Paula Shocron’s “Solo Piano Improvisation” (despite its energetic central passagework) or the three parts of “Relámpagos” (Lightning) for piano/prepared piano and clarinet or saxophone by Duquesa (Duchess, which is the name Fabiana Galante and Luis Conde, who are partners in life as well as performance, give to their duo), verge on Modernist classical.  The opening piece, “Improvisation on a Graphic Score” by the Pablo Díaz Quinteto, tests the listener’s patience:  aggressively atonal, most of it sounds like warming up to something, but what?  There is an extended interval of that grimy, bawling sax from Pablo Moser in the middle, after which the whole ensemble kicks in for about a minute of furious momentum—and, yes, the tenor sax is still plenty guttural—before things wind down.  I love the sound of the baritone saxophone; the bass saxophone, on the other hand, sounds flatulent, and that is what Luis Conde plays in Rulemares.  Even so, “Primer Jugo Bovino” (essentially translating as “Beef Tallow”) is unique as the only guitar piece on the record, and Molina’s chopped-and-grated technique in certain passages can put the listener in mind of the Gang of Four.  It is every bit as atonal as the opener.  “Amable Amanecer” (Gracious Dawn) is more tuneful, if ruefully in minor mode throughout, with its wounded-swan soprano sax (Pablo Ledesma) and double bass (Mono Hurtado) dialogue and its fluttery piano accompaniment from Fernández.  The long passages of quietude interrupted by keening strings are reminiscent of King Crimson’s “Providence” (1974).  Darker still and more furtive is “Che,” which pairs Leonel Kaplan’s trumpet with electronic sampling by Christof Kurzmann of percussion, bass, tremulous long tones, a male voice, even a bit of bandoneón for local color.  The one offering apart from this that features bandoneón (as well as flute) is the closing track, “Transición” (Transition).  With the bandoneón progressively asserting itself, this is the only instance in which the players sound distinctively “Argentine” and approach the sound of the late Astor Piazzolla and the nuevo tango, though the tango rhythms are highly sublimated.  “Plaza y la Vía” (Plaza and Street) is a somber, sedate three-part chorale for trumpet (Kaplan) generally on top, soprano sax in its lower register (Pablo Ledesma) in the middle, and bass (Mono Hurtado), with a few passages of active counterpoint for contrast to all the acerbic sustained tones.  Enrique Norris, a cornetist who is one of the elder statesmen of the Buenos Aires avant jazz scene, leads his trio in “La Playa Pequeña” (The Little Beach), a six-minute number with a weeping bass line and horn playing that is mostly improvisational busywork but has an almost cartoonish “intro” (about a minute into the performance) and outro, accompanied each time by a gong.  The recording “18:18” by Data Peluda, whose duo name might translate as “Fuzzy Math,” is a sputtering, spasmodic eruption of hooty woodwind weirdness, becoming shriekier toward the end, featuring the A-flat (or piccolo) clarinet of Jorge Chikiar and, once more, Conde’s bass sax.  The prettiest piece, in its moderately dissonant way, is “La Puerta R” (The “R” Door), which pairs Norris and Shocron in an odd duo—odd because for the first half, one hears only the cornet and then only the piano.  Norris’s horn divagations as he tentatively sketches motifs evoke the trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s stark playing on Flood (2008), or even, improbably enough, the sunniness of Herb Alpert’s on Toots Thielemans’s “Ladyfingers” with the Tijuana Brass (1965).  This is the only track in which the listener becomes aware that it was recorded live, with audience applause following.  A compilation like New Improvised Music from Buenos Aires is too specialized and too “way out there” musically speaking to garner more than a highly selective audience, yet that dedicated group of aficionados has been ESP’s stock in trade ever since the label’s founding in 1964.

Sample song  “La Playa Pequeña”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT5uEdPfvds