Tinashe: Quantum Baby
Slight compared to 333, not least because it’s 22 minutes, but there are good vibes (one of which was also enough of a song to be her biggest hit in a decade), there’s one called “No Broke Boys” on which she makes sure she sings the chorus clearly, there’s a post-Pantheress move that again makes me wonder why they don’t make the whole plane out of that (“Nasty”, “Thirsty”, “Getting No Sleep”)
Emily Howard: Torus
Howard’s a Oxford math major turned composer, and after skimming her article in the London Mathematical Society newsletter, I can say that sure, that descending brass blurt on “Antisphere” is totally an analogy to negative curvature; as for “Compass”, which is “partially set inside a Seifert-Weber space”, I’m not going to glue dodecahedrons to themselves in my head to work that out (“Antisphere”, “Torus”)
Your usual very good Nordijazz album: Hanna Paulsberg wails, Marius Klovning gets angular then makes everyone hold hands on his two compositions, Hans Hulbækmo and Bárður Reinert Poulsen go anywhen they want on the live tracks from the ’50s through today (“Monica fra Svolvær”, “Flukten”, “Omar’s Theme”)
Grupo Frontera: Jugando a Que No Pasa Nada
Edgar gives in and lets the band be more rural and more country than on El Comienzo, and while Paco Solis gets heartbreak acros, not even lassoing Benny Blanco brings the pop magic that comes so easily on their guest spot on Shakira’s new album (“Los Dos”, “Ya Pedo Quién Sabe”, “Nunca la Olvidé”)
Less “humid Virginia July” heavy and more “repeatedly swinging a copy of Stewart’s Calculus: Early Transcendentals into your head” heavy; different(ial) strokes and all (“Endless Grey”, “Violet Seizures”, “Concrete Cliffs”)
Ivo Perelman Quartet: Water Music
The liners make a big deal of Perelman’s new mouthpiece, and since I absolutely don’t have the ears to hear that to me it’s yet another Perelman(/Shipp) album, which is to say, duh, good: extending the tenor sax range to a very high shelf on the title track, going “fine here’s some melody I guess” on “Sound Essence”, conflating blues and freedom and showing off all over (“Life Force”, “Sound Essence”)
Les Belgicains: Na Tango Ya Covadia 1964-70
Just because Congolese rumba is the deepest well of 20th century music doesn’t mean you can’t tell you’ve reached “not mentioned in Rumba on the River” depths (“Ngaï Dhesolé”, “Palado Palado”)
Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble
I have an unusually high tolerance for cringe and even I think chanting “RBG” on the central suite is too much, but the band makes material from Ornette to John Denver swing (the former admittedly harder than the latter), the saxists get some space for expression, and pianist Dawn Clement adds a few simple, pretty vocals without oversinging—on a jazz record, I know, hard to believe (“Be That As It May”, “Feet Music”)
Kalevi Aho: Violin Concerto No. 2 & Cello Concerto No. 2
The violin work, with Elina Vähälä as soloist, has a vaguely exotic first movement, lots of multistop showoffery in the adagio, and a speed-kills finale that’ll leave happy hardcore fans breathless; the cello piece, starring Jonathan Roozeman, is fine if moody (“Violin Concerto No. 2”)
Melt-Banana: 3+5
Extremely loud and somehow only intermittently annoying: Yasuko Onuki chirps to kill, the single has a sense of space deemed superfluous elsewhere, the BPMs are more likely a symptom rather than a cause of unreality but I wouldn’t push my luck (“Flipside”, “Code”)
Tems: Born in the Wild
Maybe the least wild African record ever, which might be what you’d expect from a Celine Dion fan, but in addition to vocal range, Celine’s always had songs—not always good ones, heaven knows, but songs nonetheless (“Love Me JeJe”, “Get It Right”, “Gangsta”)
***
Dave Moore wrote about Glenn McDonald’s book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song and convinced me I need to buy it when it’s on sale. Pending that, here’s an old, mostly unreadable (sorry, I only learned how to draw nice graphs in R later when I had to teach that) map I made long ago of voters in 2011 Pazz and Jop, aka “the last good one”. The axes are rescaled principal components; the axes labels are my oversimplified interpretation—that is, the algorithm spit out numbers and I called them “Indie to hip hop” and “Consensus”. I can’t say I can spot exactly where Dave is, but if you click to embiggen and squint, you can see the word “Kogan” in the bottom right, so somewhere around there.
My points, inasmuch as there are any, are (a) once you have some way of trying to measure things like “taste” as vectors, you can write code to draw endless maps of stuff, but just as it’s impossible to fully represent an antisphere on a flat screen, no single representation will give you a complete view, and (b) as far as I can tell, humans are better than computers at (i) telling whether a representation has any use, and (ii) understanding and explaining what the representation actually means. I might be wrong about (i) because Spotify has the ability to run massively complex and possibly ethically dubious experiments, and I might soon be wrong about (ii) because it might be possible for people with extremely high domain knowledge (more than me) and tech skills (again, more than me) to conjoin streaming service data with LLMs to do music recommendation and maybe even music criticism at a superhuman level. But given that Spotify canned McDonald, they might not think it profitable to do this for a while. In the meantime, I’ll die with this hammer in my hand.
Same thought on the book...
Will be curious what you think about the book. I like the idea of describing lots of different paths between data/songs in somewhat nerdy detail, whereas I felt the book was somewhat (maybe understandably?) afraid to do this and kept feinting toward bigger ideas the data doesn’t or maybe can’t support. My favorite section of the book was detective story about Filipino Christmas music, felt like I could have read a dozen of those