MUSIC 2024: A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield
December 31, 2025
GENERAL COMMENTS
Another year in which forgettable artists like Ariana Grande dominated media coverage, 2024 also featured a silly feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake (does anyone not believe these things are ginned up for the sake of buzz?), the release of Beyoncé’s “country” record, Cowboy Carter, and the rise to widespread popular attention of the campy Chappell Roan, whose debut album actually premiered in 2023. Charli XCX tried to make the title of her current album, Brat, an adjective of praise in the larger culture, with limited success except perhaps in terms of album sales. As for the larger world, one can only sigh, as I repeat what I said one year ago: “In light of the disastrous self-inflicted wound American voters dealt us in November … we may look back on it as a golden age, yearning to trade for Joe Biden’s gaffes and stumbles in place of Donald Trump’s malevolence, greed, vindictiveness, self-dealing, and sheer incompetence.” The Democratic Party, in the wake of that electoral disaster, engaged dismayingly in an unproductive series of ritual circular firing squad episodes, while the far right, having conquered the Republican Party and the federal government machinery, gloated at being given license to hate and wreak destruction.
Apart from seeing my friend Steve Holtje (trombone and keyboards) with his group led by singer Rose Tang and including a saxophonist and drummer, at Ibeam in Gowanus, a tiny performance space/gallery, there were again no live popular music performances worth remarking on for the year in my own experience, except if you count seeing the Broadway play Stereophonic, about a Fleetwood Mac–like band about to reach the pinnacle of its career, in August. The actors had to learn how to be convincing as musicians on stage. Melissa and I again did not make it to Celebrate Brooklyn! at all during the year—which says something about us as homebodies but also perhaps about the programming at Prospect Park—except for one negligible performance during which a black female D.J. spinning between acts brought out a couple of dancers waving Palestinian flags; between that and the rampant pot smoke (note that smoking anything in New York City public parks is illegal and has been for more than a decade), I left disgusted.
Notable deaths from 2024 included the great Peter Schickele, the genius behind the P. D. Q. Bach act, and the legendary Chita Rivera. Also Steve Lawrence, Kathryn Crosby, Anita Bryant, Kris Kristofferson, Quincy Jones, Roy Haynes, Benny Golson, Tito Jackson, Eric Carmen, Toby Keith, Mojo Nixon, Melanie, David Soul, Chris Cross of Ultravox (not Christopher Cross), Duane Eddy, Steve Albini, David Sanborn, Zakir Hussain, Françoise Hardy, Catherine Ribeiro, Sérgio Mendes, Angela Bofill, James Chance, Kinky Friedman, Bernice Johnson Reagon, John Mayall, Frankie Beverly, Greg Kihn, Cissy Houston, Phil Lesh, Sugar Pie DeSanto, and many others. Personal to me and my tastes, the year also saw the passing of Peter Sinfield, King Crimson’s lyricist in the band’s early days, and Richard Macphail, Genesis’s road manager until 1973 (and again in 1976, and with Peter Gabriel for his first two solo albums).
My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2023 (it was Luis who introduced me to the band English Teacher), and to my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Ariel, for their support. Melissa gets special thanks for her understanding and moral support; once again had to endure my taking the holiday week in the final days of December wrapping up this survey, repeatedly playing the same albums on her living room Bose player. I strive to do better each year, but somehow life gets in the way.
This year produced a tie for the winner, for only the second time. (The first time was in 2008.) I could not decide between two very different records, English Teacher’s sublimely literate, variegated, and remarkably self-assured debut and Justice’s latest glam/disco/gloriously souped-up electronica with a long roster of guest stars. Also notable were Gordon Chapman-Fox’s latest as Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan (a first timer in the survey, as last year I could not get my hands on The Nation’s Central Location) for urban planning nerds who also like abstract music, Beth Gibbons’s first solo album, and returns to the survey by Elbow, Floating Points, Goat, Pond, and Yīn Yīn. I had one 2024 album I chose not to review when I discovered it was a reissue, on one CD, of two Dry Cleaning EPs from 2018 and 2019, Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and Sweet Princess. There will be another Dry Cleaning full-length album early in 2026.
My list of the Top Ten (of the pops) for the year follows:
1. English Teacher, This Could Be Texas
Justice, Hyperdrama
3. Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, Your Community Hub
4. Stereolab, Little Pieces of Stereolab (A Switched On Sampler)
5. Goat, Goat
6. Elbow, Audio Vertigo
7. Beth Gibbons, Lives Outgrown
8. Pond, Stung!
9. Yīn Yīn, Mount Matsu
10. Floating Points, Cascade
ROCK/POP ALBUMS OF THE YEAR
ENGLISH TEACHER, This Could Be Texas (Island
Records/Universal Music Group)—At times, this northern English band
(from Leeds and Lancashire) on its debut record sounds like Dry Cleaning (see the 2021 and 2022 music surveys); at times, like Regina Spektor. Other passages bring to
mind Stars of Montreal. Its members are restless and inquisitive enough
to explore multiple genres while putting their unique stamp on each.
One near constant is the punky bass grooves (Nicholas Eden) that power
the kinship with Dry Cleaning. Although singer Lily Fontaine speaks
rather than sings some of the lyrics in the preferred manner of Florence
Shaw (of Dry Cleaning), the vibe is different; lyrics here are somewhat
more conventional and do not sound like eavesdropping on private
conversations. Moreover, Fontaine is a reasonably capable vocalist, her
grainy voice rich with character. The album’s starting course, for
which Fontaine’s opening lines display her singing at its most ragged
edge (sustained tones can be toughest), “Albatross,” is stately, dreamy,
and melodic, with some of the instrumental embellishments invoking the
Electric Light Orchestra from half a century ago. Lest one think this
might be the norm, the follow-up, the bass-driven “World’s Biggest
Paving Slab,” has a relentlessly monotonal verse, though it bursts into
florescence with the chorus. Ruminative but with a far more relaxed
tempo, “The Best Tears of Your Life” turns the pattern of “The World’s
Biggest Paving Slab” on its head: the Auto-tune-assisted refrain is
robotically monochromatic, while the rest of the song billows into
subtle shadings and emotions, climaxing in a guitar passage with sampled
sounds worthy of any late Beatles composition. The confessional
“Broken Biscuits,” more
Sprechstimme
than sung, is replete with off-kilter keyboard arpeggiations. A
protracted exercise in denialism with particularly aggressive
syncopations, “I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying” is pure postpunk bliss in a
manner only the English have truly captured. The yowling intensity of
the bass groove in “R&B” neatly replicates this ethos. The lyricism
and atmosphere of reverie return with “Mastermind Specialism,” which
casts off blithe references to
Nosferatu, Doctor Who, and
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
The title track, with its idle musings and tinkly pianistic
accompaniment, moving smoothly between sections that almost suspend
rhythm and cantering figurations, is the most Spektor-ish recording,
terminating in a coda of more heavy syncopated arpeggiations—but, wait,
it is a false ending; there is a brief return to the main theme.
Further idle musings ensue in “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space,”
which, sprinkled with stop-time passages, manages to be both languid and
spiky. The whole “Who’ll build the ships?” subsection is remarkable,
building up subtle layers of feeling and aspiration, tropospheres of
wonder. Only the final line of the song is a letdown, both
compositionally and in terms of lyric, a sort of celestial Mad Tea Party
conjecture, as if the band could not agree on a satisfactory conclusion
to the magic cosmos it created. The breezy verse and briskly
undulating keyboard ostinato of “Nearly Daffodils” make this tune
closest in spirit to Dry Cleaning, though also closest to being a sheer
knockoff. Unsurprisingly at this late stage in the record, its bridge
is a series of arpeggio syncopations. As with “Not Everybody Gets to Go
to Space,” the final lyric, “You can lead water to the daffodils/But
you can’t make them drink” is distinctly unsatisfying, neither terribly
clever nor logical. The album turns uncharacteristically torchy with
the phlegmatic, swoony “You Blister My Paint,” equal parts Carly Simon
and the ending of Side 1 of
Dark Side of the Moon (1973). The
last two tracks on this long-ish album come across as if outtakes from
another project. “Sideboob” is unusually sonorous and rapturous about
the beauty of east Lancashire’s Pendle Hill, in a way that is both
sumptuously melodic, almost to the point of self-parody, and
unsettlingly carnal. “Albert Road,” the slow closer, pops up firing
blanks, with an apogee whose emotion feels unearned, with a two-note
repeating resolution that any third-grader could have come up with in
music class. Missteps aside,
This Could Be Texas is a stunning
achievement, a versatile and self-assured collection of moods and styles
from these first-timers that coheres into a convincing whole, one well
deserving of the Mercury Prize it won in its year of issue.
A
JUSTICE, Hyperdrama (Ed Banger Records/Because Music)—In a world in which justice has been warped beyond recognition, thank heavens we still have Justice. The French electronic house/“nu disco” pair, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, amply demonstrate on their first studio album in eight years (they did a film soundtrack in the interim) that they can be accompanists as well as take the spotlight. Across thirteen tracks, they hand the microphone to guests I am familiar with (Tame Impala and Thundercat) as well as those I had not encountered (Rimon, the Flints, Connan Mockasin, Miguel). For fans of Justice’s landmark
Audio, Video, Disco recording (see the 2011 music survey) like me,
Hyperdrama can come across as a bit attenuated, both in terms of power and the sheer volume at which it was recorded. Still, the duo show off the dual sides of their musical personality: the industrial aspect (Augé’s uncle owned a metallurgy firm) that simulates drills and crankshafts, and the quasi-religious aspect that draws on church liturgy as expressed through the organ and other keyboards. The composition that best simulates what the pair brought to life in
Audio, Video, Disco is “Generator,” one of six tracks that do not involve a live guest performer, a factory-fresh jolt of energy that manipulates its sci-fi theme in creative ways, including smoothing it to “Fly, Robin, Fly” (1975, the Silver Convention) texture midway through. “Muscle Memory” mines a similar vein. A couple of tracks sample bits from other artists: a snippet of the late Chris Rainbow’s florid “Dear Brian” (1977/78), perhaps just a pair of notes for voice, crops up in “Dear Alan,” while the sung chorus (the titular phrase) from Clay Pedrini’s rendition of the Italo-disco song “New Dream” (1984) is toyed with in “Incognito.” “Dear Alan” is a glider-smooth synthesizer fantasia until Justice decides to play around with a six-note keyboard sequence, speeding it up to a whir, before returning to main theme as a hard-driving dance tune. “Incognito” both begins and ends with a prog-rock-saturated glorious synth processional (think late seventies Styx, perhaps “Fooling Yourself” from 1978), but in between, it zooms and soars to an unrelated dance beat that uses “New Dream” as an anchor. At times, there is a bit of sand in the album’s gears: the short piece “Moonlight Rendez-Vous,” whose saxophone riff makes me think of Wham! and “Careless Whisper” (1984), is almost drunkenly slow and shadowy, though still plenty entertaining; “Explorer” picks up where “Moonlight Rendez-Vous” leaves off, with the damper pedal rubbing out bits of lento organ arpeggios, until Connan Mockasin (born Connan Tant Horsford), an idiosyncratic New Zealand psych pop purveyor, enters to narrate a spooky tale in the mode of Vincent Price in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (1982) before taking a brief stab at singing; and, much as I love Thundercat (Stephen Bruner), his turn at bat (more falsetto), with “The End,” drags down the pacing, in a song that begins with furious excavating sounds, concluding the record in funereal fashion. Augé and de Rosnay really must love Tame Impala; the Australian band appears twice here, on the opener, “Neverender,” which is prototypical Tame Impala psychedelia cushioned by reverberant Justice beats, and “One Night/All Night,” which processes Kevin Parker’s falsetto urgency into something that commands the dance floor, ending with a cosmic flight of keyboard fancy à la the final bars of Newcleus’s “Jam On It” (1984). The Eritrean-Dutch Rimon (Rimon Bahere) imprints her yearnful R&B stylings onto the throbbing “Afterimage” in a lovely synthesis between pop diva and backing band. The sonorous harmonies of “Mannequin Love” feature more processed vocals (falsetto yet again), this time from the Flints, a Manchester based duo of twins who have toured with Justice and drink from the same wells of inspiration. For “Saturnine,” the slouching collaboration with Miguel (Pimentel), the California R&B singer, should not work as well as it does, with shrill brass bursts in the manner of Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” (1983) and the periodic chiming of a bell woven in as effects punctuating the squidgy keyboard substrate backing the pleading falsetto (as if we have not heard enough!) vocals. Some might view this as mindless electronic dance music, but it takes tremendous skill on the part of Justice to make these tunes sound so logically effortless. Bravo!
A
And the rest . . .
ACTRESS, Statik (Smalltown Supersound)—I gave a nice write-up for Darren Cunningham’s third album as Actress,
R.I.P (see the 2012 music survey). But that was a dozen years and a half-dozen albums ago.
Statik is wispy by comparison, largely a collection of atmospheric motifs rather than anything I would dignify with the term “composition.” The primary exception is “Café del Mars,” also the longest track at nearly seven minutes, which has enough going on, amid considerable use of oscillators to produce jet engine–like effects, to keep the mind engaged. The principal theme arises at the outset, laden with pathos, and the remainder is like variations on that theme, becoming “spittier” toward the close. The following tune, “Dolphin Spray,” is cute, if unvarying, and one can easily envision the pneumatic percussive effect, like an attenuated whistle, that pervades the piece as a pod of cetaceans expelling through their blowholes. And the offering beyond that, “System Verse,” sets up a doomy theme, punctuated by videogame-ish, shrill little bursts, that creates the most dystopian ethos on the record. This three-song sequence saves
Statik from being completely dismissible. The quasi–title track and “My Ways” are both quite short, with the former little more than an undulating rumble of sustained tones with hisses of the promised static. “My Ways” marries some anguished cries with a sprightly if robotic sequence of tones intended to convey an airlessly futuristic outlook and crepuscular shading. Deep bass undertones characterize “Six,” which happens to be the album’s sixth song, but other than adding a beat and relentless static, Cunningham does nothing with them, undercutting the initial impression and failing to foster the sensation of quiet menace heard in “System Verse.” The opener, “Hell,” takes a while to get going, but when it does, it uses a repeating sequence amid much chopping and processing and distortion, including some sampled human voices, eventually adding a heartbeat percussion element, which ultimately takes over the work. Interestingly, the final number, “Mellow Checx,” features a note cycle that more or less recapitulates the one deployed in the early portion of “Hell.” “Ray” is the Gershon Kingsley “Popcorn” (1969) entry in the songlist, percolating along with more bits of sampled or simulated voices but lacking the original’s liveliness or charm. “Rainlines” posits a four-note cycle that modulates, to a beat, without making a mark. Much more could have been done with the shimmery effects over atonal piano sequences in the fancifully named “Doves over Atlantis.” Indeed, much more might have been achieved had Cunningham deployed his considerable talents as an electronica master actually to compose rather than settling for ambient backdrops and touches as finished product most of the time.
B+/B
BODEGA, Our Brand Could Be Yr Life (Chrysalis Records)—Because this record is largely (not entirely) a remake of a goodly portion of a similarly titled disc put out in 2015 by a different incarnation of the same band (called Bodega Bay at the time, as a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds), it is a step backward artistically from
Endless Scroll (see the 2018 music survey, and there was one intervening full-length album I did not review). Here we see Bodega in even rawer form as the Brooklyn band recreates an era in which it played around with its sound and tried to figure out how it wanted to position itself—a postpunk outfit? Art rock? As with
Endless Scroll, the band’s primary songwriters and singers, Ben Hozie (a.k.a. “Bodega Ben”) and Nikki Belfiglio, who are also romantic partners, strive for intellectual heft and pointed cultural commentary, but even more so than with the earlier (and hence, later, depending on how you look at things) record, these critiques fail to cohere. Lacking the playfulness of the Talking Heads of yesteryear, they also have not figured out how to distill their frustrations and concerns into cogent verse that resembles a distinct and accessible point of view. The album title is an homage to my college classmate Michael Azerrad’s influential book
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991; one of Bodega’s consistent criticisms is of the mania for “branding” oneself. It is no accident that some of the better selections on
Our Brand Could Be Yr Life are those written specifically for the disc, such as “Dedicated to the Dedicated”; the band has had a decade’s worth of performing together live and in studio to refine their approach and their attitudes. “City Is Taken,” the closing song, is semi-autobiographical for Belfiglio, who hails from Kingston, N.Y., and thus deeply personal. A lament about gentrification with an Interpol-ish intro and bridge, it is also an auto-indictment, as she is too smart and self-aware not to recognize her own small contribution to rising rents and the upscaling of districts that were predominantly black or, more likely in her specific case, Hispanic. The closing line, “Pack your bags and move to Detroit,” is not so much a sigh of resignation as the waving of a white flag—and still, people manage to find ways to scrape by in NYC. The punky yet deftly workmanlike “G.N.D. Deity,” another new track, whose title is unexplained, is a bursting of the inflated self-regard of cerebral males seeking opposite-sex partners; always giving consumerism the side-eye glance, Bodega readily limns a character who is conversant in the texts of women’s studies yet habitually browses porn. By contrast, “Bodega Bait,” the first holdover from the original record, sounds as amateurish as any random demo track from the reject bin. Sadly, a number of these earlier tunes, from the limp “Major Amberson” to the dispiriting “Webster Hall” (about a bad club experience shining light on a problematic relationship) to the blandly sunny “Protean,” are likewise short on inspiration and drained of vitality. One of the exceptions to the notion that the older songs are dimmer efforts is the potent “Stain Gaze” (on the original record, “Stain Glaze”), a yowling, bass-heavy, sludgy yet driven number that can stand alongside any other band’s postpunk calling card. “Tarkovski” is appreciably songful, though its title is baffling until a mention of the Russian film director’s book
Sculpting in Time is inserted at the ending. “ATM,” which was divided into two tracks on the progenitor record, is of a piece with the material from
Endless Scroll, forcefully declarative, not terribly musical, sprinkled with clever observations while muddling the overall message, whatever that might be (convenience is morally compromising, maybe?). “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Drum,” an aimless allusion to a 1968 Pink Floyd song, contains a stop-time tribute to the vanished Williamsburg club Northsix (now the Music Hall of Williamsburg). As with the lost individual seeking the club, the song lopes along without any particular direction in mind—although the disorientation produced by Williamsburg’s glassy new high rises, which could be any city’s, is the point of the exercise. The three-part “Cultural Consumer” (five parts on the original) galumphs forward, not finding its momentum until the rollicking third iteration. The refrain of Part III does no more than reiterate the song title, but at least it is punchily delivered. At one point, Hozie declaims snarkily, “The cult consumer was Paul.” It ends with sampled snippets from three other Bodega tracks that I guess never saw the light of day, like punching in presets on a car radio.
Our Band Could Be Yr Life can readily be written off as a band digging through its archives to re-present (often justifiably) overlooked material; Bodega, less so, but the group needs to sharpen its writing focus, and perhaps learn a few more chords.
B+/B
CARIBOU, Honey (Merge Records)—It is not a departure for Dan Snaith to make a record of dance tracks, as that is what his “alter ego” as Daphni does, but for his primary recording alias, Caribou, to do so came as a surprise. Snaith uses a lot of voices that are uncredited on the disc, much to my frustration. This album made some end-of-year best-of lists from media outlets and listener polls, but I am not so swayed. At least the record merits better than the brickbat hurled the last time I reviewed a Caribou record, 2007’s
Andorra (see the earliest music survey that I posted on the blog). This one is very different from
Andorra, which was dreamy and atmospheric, if missing the mark in many respects. In some ways,
Honey is like listening to Basement Jaxx filtered through the sensibilities of Daniel Lopatin, the electronica creator who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, except that with Basement Jaxx, you generally know whose singing you are hearing. That it is plenty repetitious comes with the genre, but it also gives you the sense that Snaith is on autopilot rather than stretching himself. The first two tracks, “Broke My Heart” and “Honey,” engage the talents of Kieran Hebden (who records as Four Tet) as arranger, and once you realize that, his influence is clear to anyone familiar with Four Tet’s style—rubbery beats, snappy tempos, lots of syncopation, intriguing percussive effects. “Broke My Heart” uses an anonymous helium-voiced singer—given the distortion, it is not even certain whether that person is a female, or is Snaith himself—for the reiterative chorus, with a lackluster lead-in stanza (most likely voiced by a woman). The Lopatin-esque vocal sampling “attacks” deployed in the title track are like chopped bits of scatting. But interspersed is a kewpie-doll voice reassuring the listener, “you’ll always be my honey.” “Got to Change,” more
chiptune than composition, recycles its core vocal passage from “Volume,” whereas the latter makes use of the “money line” from MARRS’s sole hit, “Pump Up the Volume” (1987), with a loping, percolating beat, ominous keyboard tones as punctuation, and a weird juxtaposition that posits “and I know it’s got to change” as a reply to the familiar hip-hop chant. Although “Do without You” is as monomaniacal in parroting its refrain as any track, the chord progression accompanying it takes a turn toward the unexpected, a bit of novelty to set alongside the processed vocals that sound as androgynous as anything Antony Hegarty did with Hercules and Love Affair years back. “Come Find Me” is the most pleasurable track as pure song (its nearest competitor is “Over Now,” which even has a synthesizer-led bridge/outro), with a graceful lilt (once again, the stab at creating a verse section falls flat, though), and “August 20/24” serves as its minuscule pendant, wordlessly matching its key signature and tempo. About the only selection that offers a contrasting section to the refrain (here robotically chanting “broke my heart” as in the opener, using the same descending triad but with different accent and timbre) that feels carefully composed rather than slapped together is “Campfire” (why that title, I have no idea). A gentle guitar accompaniment pervades the short track, linking mechanical refrain and pathos-tinted post-chorus, swelling with tonal resolution, or at least tentative resolution. Snaith absorbed the lively instrumental lead-in from the 1981 song “Just Friends” by René and Angela into the musical wallpaper for the otherwise featureless “Climbing.” He sings himself (I think) on “Only You,” not the famous Platters song of the same name (1955), but Snaith is not blessed with an appealing voice, and the tune’s elastic texture and vigorous syncopations militate against the dreaminess he is shooting for. Amid all the dancefloor throbbing, there are some clever compositional devices, and bringing in Hebden was a smart move, but on balance it is not enough to rise from the level of tune spinner to artistic venturer.
B+
DIIV, Frog in Boiling Water (Fantasy Records)—This is the first DIIV record I have reviewed that will receive a higher than B grade. (I did not review the band’s third album,
Deceiver, from 2019; this is its fourth.) A decade of working together has given the group a more mature sound, although that sound is still murky as the depths of the underworld and Zachary Cole Smith’s soft voice is undermiked throughout. The
shoegazing foursome have put together a solid roster of songs for
Frog in Boiling Water. Strangely, one of the least effective is the title track, which was one of the album’s five singles released. Its follow-on, “Everyone Out,” also issued as a single, likewise comes across as inert, though it generates a modicum of heat and momentum toward the close. The first two songs, “In Amber” and “Brown Paper Bag,” taken at deliberate tempos, contain a nice swirl of textures and moods amid a muddy palette full of the feedback and chiming guitars that characterize the genre. It is a good thing the CD booklet contains the lyrics because Cole Smith’s singing is barely decipherable atop the noisy brew. Melodies are so dour as to be almost anti-melodies, which is not to say dissonant, as in “Raining on Your Pillow” or “Reflected.” Strobing chords and gurgling eddies of bilious off-color instrumentation compensate for the shortcomings of a bleached-out cotton-candy vocal in “Soul-net.” The chord progression in the second half of the vocal line in “Fender on the Freeway” vaguely recalls that of the Psychedelic Furs’ “No Easy Street” (1982), except that even the Furs’ woozy sonic cocktail is a model of clarity by comparison. Partway into the song’s protracted span, the guitar playing shifts from softly strumming the first three notes of a 4/4 measure to a flat-footed four-on-the-floor rhythm that it sustains the rest of the way. “Somber the Drums” is a silly song title, yet this is a statement piece of songwriting, the best I have heard from DIIV to date, with more than faint echoes of Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” (1992). The successor tune, “Little Birds,” is a little gem of downcast and saturnine expression set to grungy, yowling guitar accompaniment and moaning keyboard tones. The album could have been improved if not everything were taken at roughly the same tempo; critics were right to point out that it would have livened up the disc had that not been the case, but perhaps the band did not want it that way. Regardless,
Frog in Boiling Water demonstrates more attention to songcraft than we have seen previously from DIIV.
A-/B+
ELBOW, Audio Vertigo (Polydor)—Spoiler alert: the song “Poker Face” on Audio Vertigo is not a cover of Lady Gaga’s signature hit (2008). In fact, although I almost gag myself saying this, the Gaga is the better song. Little matter because Elbow’s tenth studio recording is a strong entry, in spite of a few indifferent tracks toward the end, beginning with the bagatelle “Poker Face.” The band is great at putting forth anthems, and it had one of the best of the century thus far in “White Noise White Heat,” from its next-to-last record,
Giants of All Sizes (see the 2019 music survey).
Audio Vertigo leads off with another, “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years,” a majestic statement about leading a life of self-deception, in which lead singer Guy Garvey, in his working-class Mancunian accent, cops to faking it until making it, each phrase punctuated by a clomping, rising-tone guitar sequence. Nothing else on the record is as sublime as the opening number, but there is still plenty of good material to sample from. “Balu,” taken from Baloo, the name of the bear in Kipling’s
Jungle Book, is a composite character from a blue-collar milieu, bouncing around Manhattan, who has difficulties coming to grips with knowing someone who has achieved stardom. The song is orchestrated with a bracing drum attack, rambunctiously grinding bass chords, a shrill electric keyboard riff, and horn charts arranged by Garvey himself. The line “We live in a troubling age” anchors “Her to the Earth” to reality, although Garvey and the band chose, for the most part to eschew current affairs in favor of more personal and biographical subject matter. “Her to the Earth” kicks off with what Garvey refers to in an
Under the Radar interview as a “bargain basement Stevie Wonder organ” and borrows its drumbeat from Talk Talk’s “Happiness Is Easy” (1986), burbling along pleasantly, yet with resolve and determination to overlook those troubles, at least for now, ending in a plea, “Stay, my bonny girl, stay.” The first single, “Lovers’ Leap,” is about a suicide pact, with an odd little coda in which the pair leave their mark via the crater they make in the concrete. The song features more vigorous drumbeats and a profusion of Antibalas-like horns. The references in the swoony, reflective “Very Heaven” are personal enough to Garvey to be a mystery to his audience, but it strikes me that his voice in this track is a Ray Davies (of the Kinks) for our contemporary age. At one point in the song, Garvey’s vocals also put me in mind of Damon Albarn in the “windmill, windmill” portion of the Gorillaz song “Feel Good Inc.” (2005). The second half of the album is definitely weaker. There is a lot of busywork in “The Picture,” from the voluble lyrics (putting Garvey’s gruff voice to the edge of strain) to the lively drumwork from Alex Reeves, painting a confusing picture of being in love with a woman who is an enigma, part siren, part “pitiless millstone.” “Knife Fight” recalls an actual knife confrontation that Garvey witnessed in Istanbul, but it strikes me as inert and disengaged, both compositionally and lyrically, from the tension and resolution involved. Intended as a tribute to the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, “Good Blood Mexico City” (the band opened for the Foo Fighters in the Mexican capital in the late teens) seems both overly specific and deliberately obscurantist in its imagery; there is a lot of vibrant guitar passagework but in service of a less than convincing tune.
Audio Vertigo recovers with its final number, “From the River,” an appealing paean to the group’s hometown, as well as to Garvey’s son (with the actress Rachael Stirling) Jack. The song is uncharacteristically warm and effusive for Elbow, loping along sunnily to major-mode chords as it projects what wonders might be in store for the child. A solid recording that could have been a great one, it needed more consistency throughout and, I dare say, verses that are a little more universally relatable.
A-
FLOATING POINTS, Cascade (Ninja Tune)—Sam Shepherd’s “
dubstep” album is radically different from either his debut, the abstract if coldly clinical
Elaenia (see the 2015 music survey), or his most recent, the collaboration with the late Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra,
Promises (see the 2021 music survey). Not only did Shepherd, as Floating Points, and Dan Snaith, as Caribou (see above), release dance-oriented records in the same year; Snaith appears on this one, as drummer for “Fast Forward.” Is it a sellout? Floating Points’ earlier efforts were too minimalist or static for my liking, while
Cascade is anything but. Even so, the relentless nature of the beat (the dubstep is not ever-present but does appear in every track save the last) and repetitive cycles generate as much tedium as thrill. Floating Points has in fact played around with dance forms previously, if not so aggressively, on
Crush (2019), which might be Shepherd’s finest achievement to date, although I did not review it. What we have here may beckon toward Autechre (which, like Shepherd, hails from Greater Manchester) and various D.J. purveyors of house music, but it is less technically formal than the former and not as loose or free-spirited as the latter. To a certain degree, the nine offerings reward patience, as most are more than six minutes in duration and they undergo subtle—occasionally not so subtle—variations in timbre and arrangements. Typically, “Fast Forward” is a fulminating effusion, a burbling rhythm that is toyed with in various ways, souped up with electronic orchestrations (and Snaith’s live percussion), without evolving into anything more intricate. And “Vocoder (Club Mix),” despite having more prominent (distorted) vocals than any other song on the largely instrumental record, is far more kinetic than soulful. It is when faint echoes of actual musical composition leak through that the album livens up; for example, two-thirds of the way through the erstwhile generic “Key103” (named for a Manchester radio station), the beat changes to one resembling a rapidly dribbled basketball, while synth undertones appear and gradually predominate. As the beat goes away, the synth tones morph into genuine harmony, lending a sweet tinge of affirmation as they transcend the darkness into major mode. Titles like “Del Oro” and “Ocotillo” reflect Shepherd’s time in the southern California desert, working on a ballet score,
Mere Mortals, in 2022. For “Del Oro,” one can easily envision the stark bleakness of the Mojave, although the
Sonic Charge Synplant mimics a Trinidadian steel pan performance throughout. There is a buildup of urgency followed by a dissolve that leads to the same pattern reasserting itself more than once, like opening a door to find yourself somehow in an identical room. “Ocotillo” starts off dreamily, with a beatless tableau conveying the feel of a Japanese tea ceremony before introducing looping electronics (clavichords and other keyboards), which are less interesting but inevitably take over the song; it is more than six minutes before the dubstep kicks in, at which point it is rhythm for its own sake—the original setting might as well never have existed. Named for a onetime Manchester department store, “Afflecks Palace” conjures a busy urban commercial space as Vangelis might have envisioned it, if Vangelis were in the habit of setting his atmospheric fantasies to a pounding and reiterative pulse. Practically lost in the collage is the voice of Hannah Ekholm. Somewhat more audible are Hikaru Utada’s steady intonations in the brisk but affectless “Tilt Shift”—the haunting vocals clash with the busywork of the percussion programming. Those vocals carry over into “Ablaze,” which in spite of its title is as calm and benedictory a final track as you are likely to find anywhere, with no percussion at all, more dying embers than a blaze. Most entertaining is the relatively brief “Birth4000,” which at the outset pays winking homage to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and Giorgio Moroder’s propulsive production on that 1977 disco tune—the processing and twisting of this rhythmic arrangement is punchy and amusing. No matter in which idiom Floating Points is working, Shepherd’s ambition and boundless sonic ideas seem to outrun his capacity to make something substantial out of the materials he has gathered, and thus he keeps earning the same grade from me.
A-/B+
BETH GIBBONS, Lives Outgrown (Domino Recording Co.)—Portishead’s singer/lyricist is out with her first solo record, and it proffers the type of quietude that insinuates its way into your soul with repeated listening. With Portishead, which appears to be on indefinite hiatus, Gibbons is known for her quavery voice, whose live-wire tension and at times Kate Bush–like theatricality was integral to the ethos of bleakness, claustrophobia, and despair that colored the group’s act. It is therefore a revelation to discover that Gibbons can sing in “purer” form, as on the opener, the mystical, chiaroscuro “Tell Me Who You Are Today,” though more frequently she draws on the same enervated intensity that she deploys with the band. A certain exoticism tinges a number of the selections on
Lives Outgrown, perhaps an outgrowth of her recent folk- and jazz-inflected work with Rustin Man (Paul Webb of Talk Talk) and on a recording with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony. Dulcimers,
Farfisa organ, recorders, bowed saw,
mizmār (a type of Egyptian shawm),
daf (a kind of frame drum of Persian origin), and, in the jumpy, agitated yearning of “Reaching Out,” Chinese jute, which is a plant whose fiber can be made into paper—I guess James Ford was “playing” the paper?—all show up at one point or another on the album, along with more conventional orchestral instruments. The first song that sounds Middle Eastern is “Rewind,” though apparently without any actual instruments from the region (apart from percussion, though it sure sounds to me as if a shawm is present), its modal seas alternately roiling and calm. “For Sale” uses resonator guitars and violin drones to conjure its own tale of disillusion and cynicism. More modal singing and exotic percussion and strings ornament “Beyond the Sun,” which postulates a sort of “Losing My Religion” (1991) approach to faith, capped by a muted instrumental coda. The album reaches peak fulfillment with “Floating on a Moment,” a lilting piece drawing on the rich heritage of the
Canterbury scene that takes its time to flower fully, with the introduction of backup singers. Another song that blossoms only gradually is the undulating “Oceans,” as the protagonist, in a strained voice, resolves to pick herself from the disappointments and bruising that life has dealt. The concluding tune, “Whispering Love,” is another Canterbury-style offering, Gibbons’s singing set to acoustic guitar and flute, as the song—apart from a stop-time section—glides along to a piercing melody in 6/8 time, ending in sampled birdsong. Not everything on the disc is first rate, but enough bittersweet morsels are leavened in to make
Lives Outgrown a worthwhile addition, particularly for fans of Portishead, to anyone’s music library.
A-
GOAT, Goat (Rocket Recordings)—When a blogger follows a band as avidly as I have with Gothenburg-based Goat (I have reviewed each of their six records now with the exception of
Medicine, which came out in 2023), there is bound to be some repetition on the part of the critic. Hence, the usual complaints about the inadequacies of Goat’s shouty and unpolished female lead vocalist (all band members still hide behind masks onstage and in anonymity otherwise). If you can get past that formidable drawback, however, this might be the group’s best since its debut,
World Music (see the 2012 music survey). The self-titled recording rocks, it “funks,” and it is as entertaining as all get-up. Eight songs, two of them quasi-instrumentals to provide some vocal relief, and sounding as much as or more so
Afrobeat than ever, like a Nordic Budos Band or Antibalas with a less emphatic and diverse horn section. The exemplar is “Goatbrain,” riding in on a spiky underpinning of bass guitar, yielding a Jamaican feel that is only partially knocked down by the strained vocals, which are anything but laid back. Fuzz guitar and an acid flute solo also each take their turn in the spotlight. The Caribbean vibes of the bass and keyboard combo that power “Zombie” overcome some of the most dreadful chanting on the album, with an extended percussion solo midstream and lots more freaky fuzz guitar. “Frisco Beaver” (where do they get these titles?) is another funk-saturated groove behind somewhat more restrained vocals expressing the sort of mystical B.S. that is Goat’s stock in trade. Some of the guitar passagework is redolent of certain English new wave acts like Naked Eyes. The song eventually boils down to a Doors-like electric piano improvisation, but the funky undertones persist throughout. “One More Death” thematically could be an outtake from the band’s next-to-last record,
Oh Death (see the 2022 music survey). It begins the record with a sunburst of energy, churning guitars and frantic, stentorian singing, which dies away to a bridge section of interstellar, icy quietude before picking up the groove and modal riffs again without the verse repeating. The song ends on an extended, soaring psychedelic outro for synthesizer. The midtempo “Dollar Bill” has the most yowling guitar line of all and the most gratingly shrill “singing”; fortunately, the latter lasts only a short time before the instruments reclaim their primacy, including a cycle of bass notes that might well have been inspired by the bridge improvisations in King Crimson’s legendary “21st Century Schizoid Man.” “Fool’s Journey” is a change in gears, Goat in Orientalist mode, à la Yīn Yīn (see below), a lovely if ersatz chamber piece for flute, percussion, a zitherlike instrument (there are, typically, minimal credits on this disc), and piano, ending with a tremolo, a gong, a whisper, and plenty of reverb. The other instrumental, “The All Is One,” is far less substantive, essentially a short, placid duet between acoustic guitar and a Tinariwen-style “desert blues” electric, dappled with note bending, plus some sampled birdsong. The piece ends with a not terribly profound sermonette about how God is the source of all living creatures. Picking up on that theme, “Ouroboros,” the closer, asserts in its skimpy verse (and pretty basic melody) that “God is in every part of you.” Again, no prizes from the St. Thomas Aquinas Society. Does it matter? No because the sung portion (the singer performs better here than on any other song, although she is not asked to do all that much) ends barely two minutes in, and the percussion and guitar groove is infectious, with a silky overlay of horns that becomes more prominent and blaring as the mini–jam session goes on for another five minutes, the album’s longest track, ending abruptly. Love the music; hate the singing—what are you going to do? For me, the vocals are secondary when the instrumental compositions roil and sway as they do on this record.
A/A-
HELADO NEGRO, Phasor (Private Energy/4AD)—This guy, Roberto Carlos Lange, who performs as Helado Negro, sounds as if he is on Novocaine throughout
Phasor. I got the record on the strength of his surprisingly good previous album,
Far In (see the 2021 music survey), which was both far more varied and far longer than the new one, which clocks in at barely thirty-five minutes. Regression to the mean is one plausible explanation. Lange was inspired by a synthesizer/music composition machine devised by the composer Salvatore Martirano in the early seventies, for which Lange was given a demonstration at the University of Illinois. But the contrivance’s limitless possibilities may have paralyzed his imagination. Although the songs project a laid-back vibe and go down smoother than cherry syrup, there is a monotony to the textural and rhythmic uniformity. The middle of the record features four consecutive songs using a similar sort of quasi–bossa nova chugging beat. And, given the languor of the tracklist, in retrospect, the opening number, “LFO (Lupe Finds Oliveros),” seems like Monty Python’s proverbial Norwegian blue parrot shot through with four million volts by comparison. The only tune on the disc taken at a bouncy tempo, it has the virtue of being lively—and mixing things up a bit with the orchestral stop-time pause—even if I do not find the melody much to my liking. Whereas Lange often sings in a crooning falsetto, for “LFO” he uses his deepest register. From the second song, “I Just Want to Wake Up with You,” relaxed rhythms and soul-influenced singing take over. Frequently, the intros are superior to the actual songs, viz., the tinkly piano opening to “Best for You and Me” or the changing-the-radio-dial sonic sweep and beepy videogame effects of “Wish You Could Be Here.” It is not that the compositions are unpleasant or poorly executed, more that they come across as anodyne and almost interchangeable, all sort of moody and reflective. Lyrics are simplistic as well. Five of the nine songs are in English and the remainder in Spanish. The shuffling rhythm and chiming orchestrations of “Out There” are nice touches, but there is barely even a sketch of tune to it. After this point, two-thirds of the way through the tracklist, Lange mixes it up a bit—by slowing things down even more in “Flores” (Flowers) and “Es una Fantasía” (It’s a Fantasy). “Flores” really drags drowsily and registers as gelatinous and off-color. The closing number, “Es una Fantasía” yearns dreamily, to softly brushed cymbals and mellow guitar chords; at least Lange is trying to shape a real melody here, even if it comes across as denatured João Gilberto (who died in 2019 and did his best work more than half a century ago) and the complaisant falsetto can be grating. “Wish You Could Be Here” deploys a more contemporaneous rhythm track and is touchingly wistful, even if the tunesmithing still leaves something to be desired. Clearly, I got my hopes up too high after
Far In, yet that album showed what Helado Negro is capable of.
Phasor, sadly, does not.
B
L’IMPERATRICE, Pulsar (Microqlima Records)—So-called
nu-disco had its moment about two decades ago, yet for some audiences, it never grows old.
Pulsar, the third album from Paris-based L’Imperatrice (The Empress), is light, frothy stuff, fun when it chooses to be and otherwise lusterless. The band made news shortly after the release of this record in June, when lead singer Flore Benguigui announced she was leaving the group, amid allegations of mistreatment by her male bandmates, which they deny. Benguigui’s powderpuff soprano is perhaps not as charismatic as her stage presence in any case. Lyrics are in four different tongues but mostly alternate between English- and French-language songs; the English verses, despite mostly being authored by Americans, range from pabulum to embarrassing, reaching peak silliness in “Girl!” (the one song whose lyrics no Anglophone can claim), during which Benguigui stumbles over the pronunciation of “femininity.” The appearance of Brooklyn rapper Erick the Architect (Erick Elliott) of Flatbush Zombies grounds his half of the lyrics in “Sweet & Sublime” in native-speaker reality, but because I mostly despise hip-hop, it is one of my least favorite tracks. Another American, Maryland-born Maggie Rogers, sang and wrote the words and vocal melody of “Any Way,” a slower, bittersweet number with a blue-eyed R&B feel. (Part of the vocal line dimly echoes Todd Rundgren’s “I Saw the Light” [1972].) The other featured guest singer is Naples’s Fabiana Martone (who, unlike Erick, actually trained as an architect) for the spunky, sexy, chattery, sunny (in other words, very Italian) “Danza Marilù,” for which she co-wrote the sung portion (the part that is in Italian—the refrain is sadly unimaginative and of little account—and not French). Nicky Green also co-wrote “Love from the Other Side” and provided backing vocals. Fellow Microqlima artist and rapper Fils Cara co-wrote “Amour Ex Machina.”
Pulsar does well by “Me Da Igual” (It Matters Not to Me), with its Spanish refrain and French lyrics, warm in tone and springy in rhythm, and Benguigui singing in her lower register goes down more smoothly. The album kicks off with its only instrumental, “Cosmogonie,” as astral as its title would suggest, spacy keyboard sustained notes that quickly pick up a dance beat. This transitions straight into “Amour Ex Machina,” with a different timbre but only a slight difference in tempo. Apart from danceability and a funky synth flourish on repeat, it is an agreeable tune with little to set it apart from others of its genre. As well, “Love from the Other Side” and “Déjà Vue” are bubbly, midtempo mood songs, polished to an opalescent veneer and sensuous in their way but hardly standouts. The closing title track plays around with an explosion of sound dissolving into
breakbeats, after having laid down an amber-hued theme whose refrain carries a whiff of Motown pop. At its glittery best, the composition and arrangements have the sparkly cheesiness of late-career Electric Light Orchestra, but unquestionably the band also owes a debt to their countrymen, house and electronica specialists Daft Punk and, to a lesser degree, Justice (see above). In fact, in the CD booklet, the band acknowledges a huge range of influences, from composer Gérard Grisey to Serge Gainsbourg to Ennio Morricone to Philip K. Dick to Pamela Anderson and Kim Kardashian to Douglas Adams’s
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. With all this smorgasbord of high and low culture, one can only wish the end product were more keen-edged. L’Imperatrice intends to go on, now with the singer Louve replacing Benguigui at the microphone. But to what end?
B+/B
KIT SEBASTIAN, New Internationale (Brainfeeder Records)—In 2022, I said, upon reviewing Kit Sebastian’s disappointing second album,
Melodi (see the 2021 music survey), that every band deserves another chance after the disruptions of the pandemic. Unfortunately,
New Internationale, while not as flawed, is also not nearly as enchanting as the duo’s Album of the Year–winning
Mantra Moderne (see the 2019 music survey). Many of the same shortcomings crop up: weak melodies, clumsy lyrics. It is tempting to lay these at the feet of the Turkish half of the band, Merve Erdem, but I do not know the precise division of labor between her and Kit Martin, the multi-instrumentalist wizard and composer and arranger of their music. Safe to say, though, that the lyrics are in her bailiwick, and it is a particular problem when someone whose native language is not her chosen instrument sets out to write verses—not everyone is Samuel Beckett, after all. The lyrics are less of a word salad when composed originally in Turkish, which is the case for three of the ten songs on the disc. Magnifying the issue is that, while Erdem is a lovely chanteuse, she is not the clearest articulator of messages, at least in English. Or perhaps that is a blessing in disguise, as it allows the listener to focus more on the music itself. Of the English-only verses, the best are found in the opener, recounting the legend of Faust and his pact with the devil; interesting that the song “Faust” focuses only on the “worldly pleasures” part of his bargain rather than the thirst for knowledge. I cannot say who is responsible for composing the sung melodies, but, as on
Melodi, they suffer by comparison with the orchestrations, for which Martin shines as always. It is near impossible to concoct something bewitching on a base of gloppy pop, and for the most part, Kit Sebastian does not pull off the trick, though it depends on the ratio of syrup to gin (or rum, or vermouth, or whatever). “Faust” happens to be the least syrupy and hence most convincing track, with an air of drama and mystery, its core theme embroidered by the
saz, or
bağlama, played by Martin. “Camouflage” is not bad, either; a bittersweet melody with a contrasting modal countermelody and orchestrations for sax, trumpet,
oud, and congas. “Metropolis” was intended as the lead single, conveying the immigrant’s struggle to adjust to an alien society. Musically, it took shape modeled after themes by famed Azerbaijani musicians (sorry, this is straight out of Bandcamp’s album notes) but set to a Western funk groove. All that is great, except it far outpaces the skill level of the sung tune and multitracked chorus. Similar subject matter is echoed in “Göç/Me” (Migrate/Don’t), one of a couple of tunes (the other being the title track) on which Erdem switches from singing to spoken word. What is most intriguing about “Göç/Me” is its psychedelic intro, which carries a whiff of the “Ethio jazz” of Mulatu Astatke or Getachew Mekuria. Of the other Turkish tunes, “Ellerin Ellerimde” (Your Hand in Mine) starts with a guitar part that is vintage Beatles “And I Love Her” (1964), before settling into a pedestrian melody set to a jaunty, trotting rhythm. “Bul Bul Bul” (Find Find Find) opens with
wah-wah pedals and
gangsa bells, but, once again, the sung part cannot compete with these splendid arrangements. The title track has one of the densest layers of participation by guest musicians, including a full chorus, but, apart from the dynamic musical transition to Erdem’s “rapping” and the periodic keyboard attacks, it comes off as sadly mundane. The weakest of the offerings are “The Kiss” and “Mechanics of Love,” in which Martin appears to take a back seat with only subtle accompaniment. Kit Martin is too serious a student of music from varied cultures to be accused of musical tourism; even so, the combination of his taste for exoticism and sixties nostalgia may be starting to wear thin, unless he and his partner can fashion more compelling principal themes to go along with them.
B+
POND, Stung! (Spinning Top Records)—Since I started critiquing Pond with its sixth album,
Man It Feels Like Space Again (see the 2015 music survey), the Fremantle band has released a new one every two years or so, perhaps slowing slightly during the pandemic, and every even-numbered one has been quite satisfying, while the odd-numbered ones were slightly disappointing. Fortunately,
Stung! is the tenth. Under the general rubric of sun-kissed psychedelic pop, the so-called double album (less than fifty-five minutes of music) offers a nice sonic variety, from the beatific, beachy vibes of “Constant Picnic” or “Sunrise for the Lonely” to the coruscating glam and easy (if disturbed) couplets of “So Lo” to the grotty swamp rock (in Australia, perhaps “billabong rock”) and raucous vocals of “Black Lung” to the dreamy, Moody Blues–quality ballad “O’ UV Ray” to more or less straight rockers like “(I’m) Stung” or “Last Elvis.” The quasi–title track is snappy but a little pat for a song expressing wounding, with a chord progression toward the end that echoes that of Genesis’s “Misunderstanding” (1980). Grittier and more complex in texture, “Neon River” rings out winningly, in spite of lyrics that mean little (the line about “holding my liver” is certainly odd, serving little purpose except as a rhyme to “river”). The only pure instrumental, “Elf Bar Blues,” for electric keyboards, is well conceived enough to pull off the trick of being brightly sober. “Edge of the World Pt. 3” bears little relation to its two predecessors, each from
The Weather (see the 2017 music survey), except insofar as they are all a little spacy and have codas. The songs, and the codas, keep getting longer with each version. The newest of the namesakes starts off like a moody Todd Rundgren tune, bridges to a clomping section that combines ominous chimes (AC/DC, “Hells Bells”?) with saxophone (Supertramp?) and flute (Jethro Tull?), then proceeds to a declarative if monotonal concluding passage before entering the three-and-a-half-minute coda, which takes flight in modal fashion (not quite “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and its legendary midsection) before touching down in a soft bed of flute meditations. “Boys Don’t Crash” seems to take its inspiration from the first (in the United States at least) Cure album,
Boys Don’t Cry (1980), but do not expect anything similar here; the song’s genial blandness (notwithstanding the agitated lyrics) is rescued by the warm chromaticism of the chorus’s resolution on the phrase “dream life.” It terminates with a boy’s voice sampled, babbling to a solo acoustic guitar noodling around. Mellow, tuneful, as subtle as caramel on the tongue, “O’ UV Ray” demonstrates that the band’s songwriting craft and orchestration skills have reached a new level of sophistication. The final song, the clunkily titled “Fell from Grace with the Sea,” written by lead singer Nicholas Allbrook and “Shiny Joe” Ryan, is one of the band’s most piercing compositions to date, a plangent tune for voice and piano accompaniment, with electronic instruments piling in for the chorus. Dragging down the album’s score slightly, several songs register as blanks: “Constant Picnic,” “Sunrise for the Lonely,” “Elephant Gun.” Overall, I would rank
Stung! a little lower than
Man It Feels Like Space Again or
Tasmania (see the 2019 music survey) but worthwhile all the same.
A-/B+
Sample song “(I’m) Stung”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-1Jo22w-q4
PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING, The Last Flight (SO Recordings/Silva Screen Records)—The softest and calmest of Public Service Broadcasting’s (PSB) recordings to date is also, sad to say, J. Willgoose, Esq.’s weakest effort. Each PSB release is a concept album, a quasi-journalistic archival collage in which vintage recordings of famous historical figures and narrative commentary are as central to the project as the music.
The Last Flight refers to Amelia Earhart’s doomed 1937 attempt, together with navigator Fred Noonan, to circumnavigate the globe in a Lockheed Electra 10E twin-engine monoplane, looking something like a metallic silver cigar with wings and a tail. The pair initially intended to fly west, from Oakland to Honolulu and from there across the rest of the Pacific and onward, but the plane crashed in Hawaii. So a second attempt was made from California, flying eastward instead, to Miami, through the Caribbean to the northern coast of South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, then skirting the Arabian Peninsula and across India and Southeast Asia until reaching Oceania. It was on the leg of the journey between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island in the South Pacific that the plane vanished without a trace. There is some correlation between the tracklist of the album and the stages of her journey but no exactitude. With the exception of “Electra,” which contains excerpts of recordings from the British Film Institute’s archives regarding the aircraft, all the voices on the disc (save the bird chatter from Howland Island at the very end) are recreated from news reports and passages from Earhart’s correspondence and surviving journal entries, such as the dialogue between her and her husband, George P. Putnam, in “A Different Kind of Love.” “Electra” is thus the most like previous PSB recordings: bold pronouncements and wide-eyed wonder about the plane’s capabilities, set to stirring, rhythmically intense music that foregrounds the background, chiming synths and punched-up, jagged guitar accompaniment. It is in the attempts to create stand-alone songs that Willgoose, as primary composer and instrumentalist, and his partners go astray. In particular, “The Fun of It,” featuring Berlin-based singer/songwriter Andreya Casablanca, which commemorates Earhart’s waving away of the perpetual questions about why she did what she did, is inert. Maybe I just dislike Casablanca’s vocal mannerisms, the tendency to end each phrase with a downward inflection, but, despite the spunky guitar ostinato and energetic bass bridge from band member JFAbraham, the tune is affectless, a set of hollow declaratives. “A Different Kind of Love,” sung by the Norwegian vocalist EERA (Anna Lena Bruland), who, like Casablancas, appeared on the previous PSB record (see the 2021 music survey) as well, makes reference to Earhart’s egalitarian “marriage of convenience” to Putnam, itself trailblazing. In the dialogue, Putnam awaits her return back in California, and they make travel plans together that will never be realized. “A Different Kind of Love” is not as “meh” as “The Fun of It” but pretty tame stuff all the same, an eager-to-please folky ballad. The best of the three “love songs” is “The South Atlantic,” with vocals from This Is the Kit (Kate Stables), a dreamier and subtler tune, mellowed but warm, with loft under its wings—you can close your eyes and try to envision the soaring ambition of the passage from northeastern Brazil to Senegal. A nice touch is the way the narrative news snippets begin in Portuguese and end in French. Of the more purely instrumental compositions, “Towards the Dawn,” which marks Earhart’s change in direction in her flight plan, most closely resembles “Electra,” brisk and powered more by rhythm than by its elemental melody, with dramatizations of newsreels and her own declarations as voiceovers. “I Was Always Dreaming,” the opening tune, is, appropriately, a musical reverie, gentle piano chords succeeded by string tremolos and some very deep bass sounds, with bits of Earhart’s philosophy of life spoken above them. “Arabian Flight” carries forward the excursion’s narrative but, apart from the choice of some ethnically appropriate instruments such as the
darbuka, it makes little impact as a musical composition. The most promising of the lot, “Monsoons,” which recounts the problems the aviators had with bad weather over the Bay of Bengal in Burma, is the one song that really rocks, with dire bass chords and wailing frissons of guitar washing over the tune, accentuating the urgency of the simulated voice of Earhart. Something of the spirit of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s
Dazzle Ships (1983) pervades the album, but it is less lighthearted—unsurprisingly considering the tragically mysterious ending. With “Howland,” the final piece setting to music the actual “last flight,” the band (Willgoose plus his musical partner, Wrigglesworth, and members of the London Contemporary Orchestra) veers into territory usually colonized by Sigur Rós, serene atmospherics, long tones heavy with string accompaniment, glockenspiel, a final poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recited by Kate Graham, who “plays” Earhart here, a fitting epilogue. Aside from this solemn parting tribute and “Monsoons,” even the instrumental offerings are not quite up to what we have been accustomed to from Willgoose and company, and with the sung pieces dispiriting on the whole, I can only hope this is but a dip in form as Public Service Broadcasting seeks out new sources into which it can dive deeply.
B+
REDD KROSS, Redd Kross (In The Red Records)—This has to be one of the least prolific bands of all time: considering that it goes back to 1979, when Jeff McDonald (guitarist/singer) was 15 years old, and his little brother, Steven (bassist/singer), was only 11, the self-titled album is just its eighth full-length studio release. The Hawthorne, California, four-piece band’s latest found favor with the disc jockeys at WFMU, in particular, Evan “Funk” Davies. I was of two minds, however. On the one hand, the songwriting is capable enough to deliver crowd pleasers like “What’s in It for You?” with its slightly extended verse, almost erudite lyric, and tempo change toward the end elevating it above the ordinary rock tune, or the jangly/poppy, The La’s–style “I’ll Take Your Word for It.” On the other, it can sound derivative at times. Take a listen to the bleatingly voiced, mod-tinged “Good Times Propaganda Band” or the dying-away tones of the otherwise surprisingly saccharine “The Main Attraction” and tell me if you do not hear shades of Oasis (“She’s Electric” and “Champagne Supernova,” respectively, both from 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?). The mission to purvey a West Coast version of Britpop thirty years after its heyday continues with the mellifluous “Terrible Band” and the frenetic “Too Good to Be True,” with its rapid-clip walking bass line. These guys started out as punk wannabes, as evidenced by the rambunctious final song, “Born Innocent,” written for the just-released film documentary Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story. (Born Innocent is also the name of the band’s 1982 debut LP.) But they also embraced their heritage, hailing from the same town as the Beach Boys, bending toward mainstream appeal and power pop. A band that, if its own P.R. is to be believed, influenced bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth, is now aping styles from the Beatles to acid rock. I do have a soft spot for the psychedelic offerings. “Emanuelle Insane” is short but sexy, pumping crazed vitality into your veins with its raucous stop-time chorus and a George Harrison–esque, “Within You Without You” (1967), sitar-like guitar fade-off. The opener, “Candy Coloured Catastrophe,” is the grooviest slice of psychedelia on the record—it rocks a power bass cycle even as it swirls and growls its way through emulsified grunge, easily the most memorable tune here. The lyrics are meant to jab a thumb at rockers who dabble in the fine arts; there is nothing subtle here, and the guitar bridge is unimaginative, but even so, the song gets the album off to a scintillating start, promising more than the rest can deliver. Unremarkable for the most part, “Way Too Happy” nonetheless yields a pungent chorus that will stay with you until some other song drives it out. “Stunt Queen” is a throwback rocker, searching for a Troggs or T-Rex vibe. The thundering chords of the exposition are as basic as can be, but the sung chorus adds some chromaticism; the song ends in a squeal of guitar noise. Agitating like a washing machine, “Canción Enojada” (Angry Song) is put through a wringer of emotions from distress to rage to reproachfulness, modulating when it is felt even more emphasis is needed. “Lay Down and Die” comes off as if someone had jolted the corpse of Jim Morrison alive with a million volts, a tunefully whiny screamer that ends as a stomp. Songs like “The Witches’ Stand” and “Back of the Cave” reach for the ethereal but never really get airborne. “Born Innocent,” though of recent vintage, stands out from the rest of the tracklist because it is autobiographical and a conscious throwback to the band’s early sound—simple power chords and declarative lyrics uttered as a shout-sung motto. The eponymous double-LP might be the last we hear from this band, on the verge of becoming aging rock-n-rollers, for some time, but—solidly put together, inconsistent, far from achingly original—it might also be the last I need to hear. B+
THE SMILE, Wall of Eyes (XL Recordings)—Restless experimentalism is the hallmark of Thom Yorke, that and a sometimes frustrating insistence on delivering something other than what his audiences want from him. While the refusal to pander is principled, what it means in practice is an endless succession of albums in various formats (solo, with Radiohead, with this current grouping) that resemble Radiohead’s
Kid A (2000) and
Amnesiac (2001) in their claustrophobic and enervating intensity. Jokes about being forty percent as good as Radiohead aside, this pairing of vocalist Yorke and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood (though both play multiple instruments as well), together with drummer Tom Skinner, produced a debut record two years prior,
A Light for Attracting Attention (see the 2022 music survey), to which I gave a lukewarm review, and I feel similarly about the second recording. (There is a third album,
Cutouts, released in 2024 as well, from the same sessions that yielded
Wall of Eyes; the band insists that these songs are not the leftovers from the earlier volume, but I chose not to review it.) It is hard to write about neutral, though. Lyrics and atmospherics matter more than melody, which is generally underdeveloped and strangulated, particularly in Yorke’s spindly, pitch-imperfect voice. Let me be clear—these guys do atmospherics expertly, and a lot of thought has gone into Yorke’s sometimes ponderous, often navel-gazing verse. But with so much of the record an alternately warm and cool bath of inertia (viz. the quiet synthesized murmurings of “Teleharmonic”), we are left with particular passages worthy of note. The chromatic modulations in “Friend of a Friend” rescue what is otherwise an indolent and toothless tune. The seismic change two-thirds of the way through the erstwhile languid and rhythm-suspended “Bending Hectic” touches off the loudest, most rocking segment on the album, ending in noisy reverb. The limpid piano chords permeating the serene final track, “You Know Me!” elevate it beyond its dreamy yet prosaic falsetto vocals. “I Quit” is appealingly dusky in tone, with shivery chords, but one might wish for more dynamism; it remains stuck in its Petri dish throughout, feeding off its own culture. The title track, opening up the disc, is a gentle lay with a bleak disposition; its shrill overtones give it a mild sear, and straying guitar embellishments toward the close also help add some color and texture. “Read the Room” begins with hand-wringing urgency, yet its peaceable resolution is most unfulfilling. The wiry, kinetic guitar riff that starts off “Under Our Pillows” quickly yields to one of the most tuneless compositions Yorke has ever conceived. Maybe the gents from Oxfordshire have been spreading themselves too thin (most recently, Yorke’s collaboration with Mark Pritchard on
Tall Tales; Greenwood has participated in a number of joint projects and soundtracks as well), but I would really like to see more of that final third of “Bending Hectic” from the Smile and less of the hypnotic interiority that characterizes the vast bulk of its compositions.
B+
STEREOLAB, Little Pieces of Stereolab (A Switched On Sampler) (Duophonic/Warp Records)—This is a sampler, an abridged version of the five extant volumes of the Stereolab Switched On series that began in 1992 with
Switched On and continued with
Refried Ectoplasm (1995),
Aluminum Tunes (1998),
Electrically Possessed (2021), and
Pulse of the Early Brain (2022). The entire eight-CD box set runs to ninety-four non-album tracks and “sought after deep cuts” (Bandcamp), while the digital version for some reason has “only” eighty-five. Because most of these existed independent of any of the renowned band’s full-length or “mini” LPs, I was unfamiliar with any of the offerings with the exception of “Tone Burst,” originally from the band’s second album,
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993), and “Cybele’s Reverie,” from the fourth studio recording,
Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996). The fifteen-track sampler contains three selections from each volume, in chronological order, for a total running time of about seventy-five minutes, which is plenty. Although titled “Little Pieces,” some are not so small. As the band was in the custom of putting one very long track on each of its studio recordings, at least through its heyday in the 1990s, the sampler contains one twenty-one-minute composition, “Trippin’ with the Birds,” which is weird and far longer than it needed to be, thus taking nearly one-third of the disc. My reaction to the examples from the first volume was tepid: “Changer,” shifting from monochrome at the start to full spectrum, at least has some nice vocal harmonic cycling between Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen that became one of the band’s trademarks. The sampler really begins to heat up with “John Cage Bubblegum,” the first entry off the second volume, with its groovy, pulsing ground bass supporting Sadier’s sober mantra, repeated multiple times in French: “It’s the most beautiful, and the saddest, landscape in the world.” “Tone Burst” is one of the “deep cuts,” presented in a quirky, innocuous “country” arrangement, a far cry from the heavy sonic distortion of the original’s blaring keyboards and grimy guitar strumming. Sadier’s vocal to the buzzy “Tempter” starts off like the intro to “Downtown” (1964), as made memorable by Petula Clark. “Iron Man,” the first selection off of Volume 3, is not the Black Sabbath song from 1970 but something far sketchier, with barely a vocal to speak of (what there is resembles the start, and only the start, of an advertisement from the 1960s), a lot of alacritous drumming, various electronic bursts, and the occasional Hawaiian slack-key guitar chord. “How to Play Your Internal Organs Overnight” wins the award for most whimsical song title, a quiet piece with humming and little squelchy sounds to represent the viscera. From Volume 4, “Variation One” is jaunty, “Heavy Denim Loop Pt. 2” a low drone with undulating overtones and a steady drumbeat, and “Speck Voice” a multipart miniature like so many Stereolab songs, with a mellow section set to tropical percussion following a sterner and more static opening. The first track from Volume 5, “Trippin’ with the Birds” is a spacy jam, experimental, with vast acreage in which not a whole lot happens. It periodically produces distorted voices speaking of a “simple headphone mind.” Unlike most Stereolab long-form compositions, which are basically suites of related music, this one could have been cut down considerably. “Cybele’s Reverie” is my all-time favorite Stereolab tune. Naturally, it is not as polished in a live setting, as Sadier’s voice might not have been in prime form at the Hollywood Bowl, but the band still does a creditable job with it, to close out the disc. I considered not grading this sampler since none of its contents are truly new at this stage. But what the heck; the material has not been heard by most listeners, and I have adored Stereolab for decades. I am looking forward to reviewing the group’s 2025 recording,
Instant Holograms on Metal Film, the next time around.
A/A-
WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN, Your Community Hub (Castles in Space)—Gordon Chapman-Fox is an electronica and soundtrack composer whose Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan project has thus far encompassed five albums (and three EPs). In a nutshell, Runcorn New Town is a planned community in the Merseyside borough of Halton (which is adjacent to the borough of Warrington), whose genesis was in the early 1960s. By the 1980s, its local development corporation had merged with that of Warrington before winding up its business in 1989. I cannot speak to the first four albums in the series, but I do know from an interview conducted with the composer by Bob Fischer that appeared in
Electronic Sound magazine in May 2024 that Chapman-Fox’s previous Warrington-Runcorn volume,
The Nation’s Most Central Location, was that same magazine's Album of the Year for 2023 and Rough Trade’s No. 13, leading Fischer to observe that “the Warrington-Runcorn fanbase [is] now large enough to populate a sizeable Brutalist New Town in its own right.” Chapman-Fox is a minimalist by disposition but not a doctrinaire one, and my biggest criticism of the seven tracks (plus two bonus tracks) on
Your Community Hub is that a listener might wish for more development over their course. Instead, they set an ambience and are content with little more than modest embellishments after, like a soundtrack in fact. The music is strikingly similar to the late Vangelis’s
The City (1990) in synthesizing a dreamy ethos. One could venture that Chapman-Fox’s take on urban planning is as utopian as that of the designers and public policy experts who promoted the Garden City and
New Towns movements in the United Kingdom, and, given how ridden down such ideas have been by conservatives over the years and how cynical the public has become about the merits of government services, there is something refreshing about his celebratory attitude. So how can a composer translate the notion of a community center into music? Everything is more abstract even than the utilitarian architecture that characterizes a lot of these developments, naturally. “A Shared Sense of Purpose” kicks off the record in exploratory mode, a bit tentative, with a cantering synthesizer theme and lots of shimmery reverb and zoomy effects. Other than the rhythmic elements briefly dropping out midstream and at the conclusion, nothing much happens, until a voice replicating one of the planners’ ideas is sampled at the end. “Rapid Transport Links” is darker in hue, and more percussive without any actual percussion (bass supplies the beat), for the most part, with airily expansive arpeggiations and choral sonorities supplying what little melodic suggestion there is. While “Cul-de-Sac” is quiet, ruminative, and fairly static, “Facilities for All Ages” is a little more sprightly, marinating in blares and bleeps. “A New Town with an Old Sense of Community” sets out a striding, uninterrupted, triplet-studded motif over ceremonial long tones, subtly introducing Euro-disco pulses that grow more prominent as the piece progresses. “Summer All Year Round” opens with a moderately high-pitched buzzing—envision cicadas in the trees—and adds a thrilling bass thrum to the mix, introducing ominous science fiction tones that threaten to overwhelm the initial motif. Still more doomy is “Pedestrian Shopping Deck,” from the obsidian undertones to the minor-mode keyboard descending chords—one might worry that the shopping deck is in imminent danger of a catastrophic collapse. The first bonus track, “Oakwood,” is sort of Kraftwerk meets early Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: sere at the outset, then bringing in beepy notes separated by an octave, followed by intermediate-tone and shriller burblings in intricate, interlocking patterns. The second is a reworking of the opening track in more maximalist fashion as an interplay between sampled chorus, acoustic guitar, and keyboards, eventually inviting in Mellotron guitar pedal–like effects; this is labeled the “1973 version,” oddly enough, since it is likely that Chapman-Fox was not even born until the mid-seventies.
Your Community Hub manages to be aspirational without turning a blind eye to the inevitable shortcomings of planned developments, and to have expressed all that through sound alone is no small achievement.
A/A-
NİLÜFER YANYA, My Method Actor (Ninja Tune)—On reviewing Nilüfer Yanya’s second full-length record,
Painless (see the 2022 music survey), I said she needed a more inventive songwriting partner to rescue her from the dreaded sophomore slump. Instead, she stuck with Will Archer (now styling himself as “Wilma Archer”), her collaborator through most of that 2022 disc. I cannot express enthusiasm for the results on
My Method Actor. Not to say that these are bad songs; I do not want to denigrate Archer’s abilities as a composer and producer. It is rather that the excitement produced by Yanya’s debut,
Miss Universe (see the 2019 music survey), which was lively, humorous, and stylistically varied and had an overarching mock concept to it, has not been replicated since. The first two songs on the new album are spirited; the third, the quasi–title track, begins a downshift into slower tempos and a sullen, introspective mood that never really lifts. The songs are wordy without expressing anything terribly revealing or profound. The sameness of the textures makes this an airless, almost joyless recording. Yanya is singing in British R&B mode, even as the musical idiom remains alternative rock. It would be one thing if she had a cherubic voice to carry the day; instead, her instrument is thick and a little grainy, not at all bad in the proper setting but never one to light the world on fire. “Keep on Dancing,” the leadoff, has an appealingly swingy rhythm to a galloping guitar part and features a melody of shifting coloration. It is also, alas, the album’s shortest song. Its follow-up, “Like I Say (I Runaway)” sports fuzzy, reverberant, rolling, tawny-hued guitar and bass lines, not to mention a rather silly video (see below). The midtempo “Method Actor” is more subdued but still possessed of agile rhythms and a poignant melody, peculiarly offset by strident bass attacks at the introduction of the chorus. Of the remaining tracks, there is just not much to choose, unless you are in the mood for one sober, navel-gazing ballad after another. Pleasant in a soporific way. “Mutations,” a creditable tune, picks up the pace a bit, if not the sepulchral disposition. A sunny refrain lifts “Made out of Memory” above the other selections late in the tracklist. The violin talents of Ellie Consta go to waste in the schmaltzy string accompaniment to “Faith’s Late.” The dreamy atmospherics (including field recordings) of the closing song, “Wingspan,” are undermined by a stupefyingly clunky lyric. It might be unrealistic to expect the Nilüfer Yanya of the debut album to reappear, but I do not want to abandon the hope, alas, because the more recent vintage tastes more like New Coke.
B+/B
YĪN YĪN, Mount Matsu (Glitterbeat Records)—Frequently, when I listened to
Mount Matsu (a fictitious mountain, although “
matsu” means pine tree in Japanese), I thought of the Houston band Khruangbin (see the 2018 and 2020 music surveys), and the Bandcamp writeup about this record supported that association. Not only does Yīn Yīn take inspiration from Southeast Asian music of a swingy era some fifty to sixty years ago, as does Kkruangbin (which borrows its name from the Thai for airplane), but likewise its tunes are largely instrumental, with the vocals merely suggestive accents rather than true lyrics. But
Mount Matsu, the follow-up to
The Age of Aquarius (see the 2022 music survey), differs in that it leans more heavily on Japan as a source, particularly
sokyoku (traditional music for the
koto, a kind of zither). Still, the Dutch quartet, now resident in northeastern Belgium, across the river from their hometown of Masstricht, is after a more eclectic and hip sound, one that showcases a fair variety within its eleven songs. Psychedelia still plays a major role throughout, but “nu disco” is a recurring element as well, as in “Takahashi Timing,” one of the most Khruangbin-esque numbers (together with “Shiatsu for Dinner”), and “Tokyo Disko.” “Takahashi Timing” is pleasant enough, if a bit mechanical and emotionally neutered, not to mentioned protracted, whereas “Tokyo Disko” is a little more energetic and focused, allowing some space for pentatonic and percussive improvising along the way. The song after “Takahashi Timing” has a mewling chorus that makes “Pia Dance,” another disco-fied tune, the least appealing on the tracklist. “White Storm,” all too predictable in its chord progressions, offers empty calories across its five minutes, as if Euterpe had fled the band members during its composition. And although the
guzheng (a Chinese zither) is a nice touch in the final offering, “Ascending to Matsu’s Height,” the piece still comes off as bland. On the opposite side of the ledger, the matched pair “The Year of the Rabbit” and “The Year of the Tiger” convey a stately Orientalism, the former providing a modernist, Western gloss on what could easily pass for a traditional Japanese theme, the latter kicking off with an ominous drone before launching into something far more innocuous and easeful. The opening notes of “Tam Tam” are remarkably similar to those of the Temptations’ famed “My Girl” (1964), although the rest of the instrumental goes its own way, for an interval of blissful Zen. Its successor, “The Perseverance of Sano,” is suffused in surf guitar nostalgia, more Ventures pastiche than Jan & Dean or Takashi Terauchi. Even so, the woolly, shrill synthesizer line and the acid guitar licks in the song’s midsection are an atomic blast. “Komori Uta,” which translates from Japanese as lullaby, is a remarkable departure, a louche, relaxed, tinkly little number for keyboard,
koto, and woodblock and other percussion, in which nothing much happens, though an uncredited female voice is heard dreamily uttering phrases in Japanese (presumably). Nearly as dissolute as “Komori Uta” is the oddly titled “Shiatsu for Dinner,” serene and lethargic. A tone poem that just about never progresses, the song is interested only in setting a mood. It is hard to make the case that
Mount Matsu represents an advance over
The Age of Aquarius, but it manages to be qualitatively different, even as it draws on the same sources of inspiration, while preserving the sheer entertainment value.
A-/B+
LATIN
ORQUESTA AKOKÁN, Caracoles (Daptone Records)—A curious combination of hot licks and sometimes fusty themes,
Caracoles (which can mean any one of a number of tightly curled objects, primarily a snail but also a hairstyle or a spiral staircase) is, like the band that produced it, a genuine “Nuyocubano” hybrid. The brainchild of a pair of presumably non-Latino performers/arrangers/composers/producers with deep experience in Latin jazz and popular idioms, Jacob Plasse and Michael Eckroth, Orquesta Akokán (Yoruban for “from the heart”), the group comprises mostly Cuban musicians, with some New York veterans mixed in. As with the group’s Grammy-nominated, self-titled debut from 2019, which I do not possess,
Caracoles was recorded at a Havana studio, Producciones Abdala. Plasse and Eckroth serve as the bandleaders and play, respectively, the
tres and piano as well. Whereas the debut album (there has been one intervening album) featured José “Pepito” Gómez as lead singer, the current one places Kiko Ruiz, a Cuban singer who has participated in Estrellas del Buena Vista Social Club and Los Jóvenes Clásicos del Son as well as being a priest of the Congolese-Cuban
palo religious tradition, front and center. Ruiz is a capable tenor, if his tone is slightly pinched. The musicians are uniformly excellent and the arrangements tight and full of vitality. What I find lacking are the melodies that carry songs, like the insipid title track, which alternates between Spanish and a Congolese dialect, and I am unsure of how to apportion blame between Plasse, Eckroth, and Ruiz, who co-wrote everything that appears here. While the gallant balladry of the opener, “Con Licencia” (With Permission), beckons warmly toward the Cuban big bands of the mid-twentieth century, when the mambo craze peaked, other tunes more resemble an
I Love Lucy Desi Arnaz pastiche. “Suave Suave” is short and energetic but sounds as though artificial intelligence scraped a pile of mid-century 45 RPMs and regurgitated its own “creation.” The closer, “Doña Felipa,” suffers from similar drawbacks, a shopworn song sequence over tepid arrangements. The band does better with the brisk, no-nonsense “Pan con Tíbiri” (which seems to translate as “Guava Sandwich,” although the expression “
tíbiri, tábara” conveys a sense of lazing around). This number, which has been described by people with deeper knowledge of Latin music as a combination of mambo and
mozambique, a vigorous style of dance music derived from Cuban street carnivals, really cooks, fired by the congas and other percussion, even as it shows little variation—one short keyboard riff and a brief, hushed section of rapid-fire syncopations. “Cha-Cha-Cha Pa’Ca” (Cha-Cha-Cha for Here) has a slinkier tune, in the classic cha-cha rhythm, with some sinuous piano vamps and a tasty flute solo from Itai Kriss, and Ruiz trades off vocals with Carolina Oliveros, a New York–based, Barranquilla-born singer whose throaty voice is an acquired taste. Relating a tale, with people taking on animal characteristics, of a guy (the “lion”) looking for trouble around town with the wife of “the shark,” “La Fiera” (The Beast) again features a less than convincing tune, but the juicy arrangements underneath are so compelling as to make up for it. Much the same in terms of melodic blandness but sizzling orchestrations is “Las Siete Vidas de Inés” (The Seven Lives of Inés), ending with a dreamy piano sequence. “Flor de Mi Campo” (Flower of My Field) is more primitivist, resting heavily on its percussion ensemble, with an a series of incantations above. “Pregonero” (Town Crier, or Auctioneer) is a change-up, a shuffle with some peculiarly pentatonic choral passages, a relaxed composition with an easy trumpet improvisation that ends in a furious
descarga. The fiery musicianship expressed by the instrumental players and percussionists on
Caracoles calls out for more imaginative primary songwriting from its directors.
B+
JAZZ
BEINGS, There Is a Garden (No Quarter)—Largely instrumental, tumultuous for the most part but sunny and emulsified in its quieter moments,
There Is a Garden, the debut record by Beings, sometimes breathlessly referred to in press releases as a “supergroup,” is a veritable achievement that falls short in a number of respects. The compositions are primarily an interplay between saxophonist/keyboard player Zoh Amba, who trained under David Murray, and guitarist Steve Gunn, a onetime member of Kurt Vile’s backup band the Violators. Their rhythm section consists of Jim White, a much sought-after Australian drummer and producer who is nearly my age and thus a generation older, and Shahzad Ismaily, a bassist who is intermediate in age and has been part of Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog trio and has played with Vijay Iyer, Yoko Ono, Mike Doughty, Laura Veirs, and others. Ismaily also performs at times on synthesizer. Although interchange between members of the quartet is fundamental, as with all avant and jazz ensembles, one gets the sense that this is foremost Amba’s group. She carries the main theme throughout, whether by means of the tenor sax, the piano, or the harmonium. She even sings on the second and second-to-last of the nine tracks, although her voice is so unprepossessing that she might do well to forgo it on future releases. It is not merely the quality of the singing that drags down “Flowers that Talk” and “Morning Sea”; the sung melodies are also lame. “Flowers that Talk” begins dreamily with acoustic guitar, synthesizer, and rolling drumbeats, until interrupted by the sung verse, with a much straighter rhythmic pulse. “Morning Sea” is uniformly a song from start to finish, and one that shows a glimmer of promise when beckoning toward a harmonic change, yet it quickly reverts to the unassuming theme with which it began. A lot of the sax playing tends toward the squealing-pig variety; the outstanding exception is “Happy to Be,” one of the longer selections, and even this becomes strained and groaning at times. The problem with “Happy to Be,” as with much of this album, is that a sole vignette, sax over tremulous guitar, is made into an entire composition; exposition never seems to lead to development. There is no sense of movement here, so the piece becomes claustrophobic over an extended span. The sax also mellows for the closer, “Do Come Again,” although this is one of the less distinctive offerings, notwithstanding a more open stage for Gunn to show his stuff. The noisiest track is also the shortest; barely a minute long, “In the Garden” is, in its truculent saxophone-y way (with heavy outbursts in support by the other band participants), the most effective in expressing what the band is about. Together with its successor, “Face of Silence,” which is a tour de force of rambunctious piano virtuosity, ranging all across the keyboard à la King Crimson’s “Cat Food” (1970)—except in that King Crimson gave us just a taste, whereas in “Face of Silence” it is the entire premise—it forms the core of the record. The opener, “Small Vows,” is prototypical in serving up a succession of sour-toned, raucous tenor sax attacks that ultimately resolve into something approaching a bluesy melody, atop a floor of shimmery, otherworldly guitar ruminations. “God Dances in Your Eyes” is essentially a nearly seven-minute drone, one that clarifies like ghee halfway through when the quietly blaring harmonium drops out or is sublimated into a mere trace. Groups like Beings are not necessarily stable; each member has plenty of other things going on, and we shall see whether there is enough mutual interest for a follow-up. But I would hope that any new undertaking will be more ambitious in not settling for one single interesting motif carrying over for six or seven minutes at a time.
B+
Sample song “Face of Silence” (no video available): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8F2gzxtOhQ&list=RDO8F2gzxtOhQ&start_radio=1
